
Qass. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The Defendant 

Varied Types 

Charles Dickens. A Critical 
Study 

The Man Who Was Thursday 

Tremendous Trifles 

What's Wrong with the World 



^ ALARMS 
AND DISCURSIONS 

By 
G. K. CHESTERTON ^ 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1911 



Co 



pNj 



^<^^ 









Copyright, 1911, by 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

Published February, 1911 



C CU2H30i)8-;^ 



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PREFACE 

I COULD wish that this string of loose papers, 
if it was to bear some such name, had been called 
after the conventional version of the Elizabethan 
stage-direction, and named " Alarums and Ex- 
cursions." If I were constrained to put my 
moral philosophy in one sentence, I could not 
do it more satisfactorily (to myself) than by 
saying that I am in favour of alarums and 
against alarms. It is vain to tell me that these 
two words were the same once and come from 
a common derivation. The people who trust to 
derivations are always wrong: for they ignore 
the life and adventures of a word, and all that it 
has done since it was born. People of that sort 
would say that every man who lives in a villa is 
a villain. They would say that being chivalrous 
is the same as being horsey. 

The explanation is very simple; it is that in 
the modem world authors do not make up their 



PREFACE 

own titles. In numberless cases they leave the 
title to the publisher, as they leave the binding 
— that far more serious problem. I had pur- 
posed to call this book " Gargoyles " ; traces of 
such an intention can still be detected (I fear) 
in the second essay. Some time ago I tried to 
write an unobtrusive sociological essay called 
" What Is Wrong." Somehow or other it 
turned into a tremendous philippic called 
" What's Wrong with the World," with a photo- 
graph of myself outside ; a photograph I swear I 
had never seen before and am far from anxious 
to see again. Such things arise from the dul- 
ness and languor of authors, as compared with 
the hope and romantic ardour of publishers. In 
this case the publisher provided the title : and if 
he had provided the book too I dare say it 
would have been much more entertaining. 



VI 



CONTENTS 



The Fading Fireworks 

On Gargoyles .... 

The Surrender of a Cockney 

The Nightmare 

The Telegraph Poles . 

A Drama of Dolls 

The Man and His Newspaper 

The Appetite of Earth . 

Simmons and the Social Tie 

Cheese 

The Red Town 

The Furrows .... 

The Philosophy of Sight-Seeing 

A Criminal Head . 

The Wrath of the Roses . 

The Gold of Glastonbury . 

The Futurists 

Dukes 

The Glory of Grey 
vii 



1 

7 

16 

23 

30 

38 

45 

54 

61 

70 

76 

84 

89 

98 

106 

lis 

119 

128 

138 



CONTENTS 



The Anarchist 

How I Found the Superman 

The New House . 

The Wings of Stone . 

The Three Kinds of Men . 

The Steward of the Chiltern 

DREDS 

The Field of Blood . 

The Strangeness of Luxury 

The Triumph of the Donkey 

The Wheel .... 

Five Hundred and Fifty-Five 

Ethandune 

The Flat Freak 

The Garden of the Sea 

The Sentimentalist 

The White Horses 

The Long Bow 

The Modern Scrooge . 

The High Plains . 

The Chorus 

A Romance of the Marshes 



HUN- 



viii 



THE FADING FIREWORKS 

In the frosty grey of winter twilight there comes 
a crackle and spurt of bluish fire ; it is waved for 
an instant in a sort of weak excitement, and then 
fizzles out into darkness : and by the blue flash 
I can just see some little boys lurching by with 
a limp bolster and a loose flapping mask. They 
attempt to light another firework, but it emits 
only a kind of crackle ; and then they fade away 
in the dark; while all around the frosted trees 
stand up indifferent and like candelabras of iron. 
It is the last Guy ; perhaps the last in all Eng- 
land; for the custom has been dwindling to 
nothing in all parts of the country. It is as sad 
as the last oracle. For with it passes the great 
positive Protestant faith which was for three 
centuries a real religion of the English. The 
burning of that image has been as central and 
popular as the jubilee procession, as serious as 
the Funeral of the King. Guido of Vaux has 
1 



THE FADING FIREWORKS 

taken three hundred years to burn to ashes ; for 
much of the time the flare of him lit up the whole 
vault of heaven, and good men as well as bad, 
saints as well as statesmen, warmed their hands 
at that gigantic fire. But now the last gleam 
of red dies in the grey ashes : and leaves English 
men in that ancient twilight of agnosticism, 
which is so natural to men — and so depressing to 
them. The echo of the last oracle still lingers 
in my ears. For though I am neither a Prot- 
estant nor a Pagan, I cannot see without sad- 
ness the flame of vesta extinguished, nor the fires 
of the Fifth of November: I cannot but be 
touched a little to see Paganism merely a cold 
altar and Protestantism only a damp squib. 

The old Protestant English who sustained this 
strange festival for three centuries, w^ere at least 
so far Christian that they tended to be Friv- 
olous. They were still sufficiently at one with the 
old rehgious life of Europe to exhibit one of its 
most notable peculiarities; the slow extraction 
of pleasurable associations from terrible or even 
painful dates and names. Nothing so stamps 
2 



THE FADING FIREWORKS 

the soul of Christendom as the strange sub- 
conscious gaiety which can make farces out of 
tragedies, which can turn instruments of torture 
into toys. So in the Catholic dramas the Devil 
was always the comic character; so in the great 
Protestant drama of Punch and Judy, the gal- 
lows and the coffin are the last and best of the 
jokes. So it is also with even the nobler solem- 
nities. St. Valentine was a priest and denied 
himself the love of women ; but his feast has been 
turned into a day for love-making. In certain 
indifferent lands and epochs this has doubtless 
gone too far; there are too many people who 
connect Good Friday only with hot cross buns ; 
there are many who at Michaelmas think only of 
the wings of a goose, and never of the wings of 
an Archangel. But broadly speaking, this 
tendency is a real tribute to the healthful and 
invigorating quality in the Christian faith. For 
if the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, 
even the terrors of the good can grow kindly. 
And there is certainly no stronger instance of 
the thing than this quaint English survival; 
3 



THE FADING FIREWORKS 

which has interpreted the most hideous of deaths 
in terms of a hilarious half-hohday; and has 
changed the fires of Smithfield into fireworks. 

Quaintly enough, among the fireworks that 
light up this Protestant festival, there are some 
that have almost papistical names ; but they 
also bear witness to the mystical levity which 
turns gibbets and faggots into playthings. 
When little boys dance with delight at the radi- 
ant rotation of a Catherine wheel, they seldom 
(I imagine) suppose themselves to be looking at 
the frightful torments of a virgin martyr cele- 
brated in Catholic art; yet this must surely be 
the origin of the title. We might imagine a 
symbolic pageant of the faiths and philosophies 
of mankind carried in this vivid art or science of 
coloured fires ; in such a procession Confucian- 
ism, I suppose, would be typified by Chinese 
crackers ; but surely there would be little doubt 
of the significance of Roman candles. They are 
at least somewhat singular things to brandish 
when one is renouncing the Pope and all his 
works; unless we do it on the principle of the 
4 



THE FADING FIREWORKS 

man who expressed his horror of cigars by burn- 
ing them one at a time. 

And, indeed, speaking of Confucianism, I have 
heard it said that the whole art of fireworks 
came first from the land of Confucius. There 
is something not inappropriate in such an 
origin. The art of coloured glass can truly be 
called the most typically Christian of all arts 
or artifices. The art of coloured lights is as 
essentially Confucian as the art of coloured win- 
dows is Christian, ^sthetically, they produce 
somewhat the same impression on the fancy ; the 
impression of something glowing and magical; 
something at once mysterious and transparent. 
But the difference between their substance and 
structure is the whole difference between the 
great western faith and the great eastern agnos- 
ticism. The Christian windows are solid and 
human, made of heavy lead, of hearty and char- 
acteristic colours; but behind them is the light. 
The colours of the fireworks are as festive and as 
varied ; but behind them is the darkness. They 
themselves are their only illumination ; even as in 
6 



THE FADING FIREWORKS 

that stem philosophy, man is his own star. The 
rockets of ruby and sapphire fade away slowly 
upon the dome of hollowness and darkness. But 
the kings and saints in the old Gothic windows, 
dusky and opaque in this hour of midnight, still 
contain all their power of full flamboyance, and 
await the rising of the sun. 



6 



ON GARGOYLES 

Alone at some distance from the wasting walls 
of a disused abbey I found half sunken in the 
grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of 
those graven monsters that made the ornamental 
water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle 
Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or 
striped by recent fungus, but still looking like 
the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval 
hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the 
meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some 
symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art. 



Once upon a time there lived upon an island a 
merry and innocent people, mostly shepherds and 
tillers of the earth. They were republicans, 
like all primitive and simple souls ; they talked 
over their affairs under a tree, and the nearest 
7 



ON GARGOYLES 

approach they had to a personal ruler was a sort 
of priest or white witch who said their prayers 
for them. They worshipped the sun, not idol- 
atrously, but as the golden crown of the god 
whom all such infants see almost as plainly as 
the sun. 

Now this priest was told by his people to 
build a great tower, pointing to the sky in salu- 
tation of the Sun-god ; and he pondered long and 
heavily before he picked his materials. For he 
was resolved to use nothing that was not al- 
most as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself; 
he would use nothing that was not washed 
as white as the rain can wash the heavens, 
nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly 
as that crown of God. He would have noth- 
ing grotesque or obscure; he would not have 
even anything emphatic or even anything 
mysterious. He would have all the arches as 
light as laughter and as candid as logic. He 
built the temple in three concentric courts, which 
were cooler and more exquisite in substance each 
than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge 
3 



ON GARGOYLES 

of white lilies, ranked so thick that a green stalk 
was hardly to be seen ; and the wall within that 
was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a 
million stars. And the wall within that, which 
was the tower itself, was a tower of pure water, 
forced up in an everlasting fountain; and upon 
the very tip and crest of that foaming spire was 
one big and blazing diamond, which the water 
tossed up eternally and caught again as a child 
catches a ball. 

" Now," said the priest, " I have made a 
tower which is a little worthy of the sun." 



II 

But about this time the island was caught in a 
swarm of pirates ; and the shepherds had to turn 
themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and 
at first they were utterly broken down in blood 
and shame ; and the pirates might have taken the 
jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount. 
And then, after years of horror and humiliation, 
they gained a little and began to conquer be- 

9 



ON GARGOYLES 

cause they did not mind defeat. And the pride 
of the pirates went sick within them after a few 
unexpected foils ; and at last the invasion rolled 
back into the empty seas and the island was de- 
livered. And for some reason after this men be- 
gan to talk quite differently about the temple 
and the sun. Some, indeed, said, " You must 
not touch the temple; it is classical; it is per- 
fect, since it admits no imperfections." But the 
others answered, " In that it differs from the 
sun, that shines on the evil and the good and on 
mud and monsters everywhere. The temple is 
of the noon; it is made of white marble clouds 
and sapphire sky. But the sun is not always 
of the noon. The sun dies daily; every night 
he is crucified in blood and fire." 

Now the priest had taught and fought 
through all the war, and his hair had grown 
white, but his eyes had grown young. And he 
said, " I was wrong and they are right. The 
sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all 
those earthly things that are full of ugliness and 
energy. All the exaggerations are right, if they 
10 



ON GARGOYLES 

exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to 
heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks 
and tails so long as they all point to heaven. 
The ugly animals praise God as much as the 
beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his 
head because he is staring at heaven. The 
giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching 
towards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear 
— let him hear." 

And under the new inspiration they planned a 
gorgeous cathedral in the Gothic manner, with 
all the animals of the earth crawling over it, and 
all the possible ugly things making up one com- 
mon beauty, because they all appealed to the 
god. The columns of the temple were carved 
like the necks of giraffes ; the dome was like an 
ugly tortoise; and the highest pinnacle was a 
monkey standing on his head with his tail point- 
ing at the sun. And yet the whole was beauti- 
ful, because it was lifted up in one living and 
religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in 
prayer. 



11 



ON GARGOYLES 



III 



But this great plan was never properly com- 
pleted. The people had brought up on gi-eat 
wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge 
necks of stone, and all the thousand and one 
oddities that made up that unity, the owls and 
the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, 
which hideous by themselves might have been 
magnificent if reared in one definite proportion 
and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, 
this was romantic, this was Christian art ; this 
was the whole advance of Shakespeare upon 
Sophocles. And that symbol ^hich was to 
crown it all, the ape upside down, was really 
Christian ; for man is the ape upside down. 

But the rich, who had grown riotous in the 
long peace, obstructed the thing, and in some 
squabble a stone struck the priest on the head 
and he lost his memory. He saw piled in front 
of him frogs and elephants, monkeys and 
giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly 
things of the universe which he had collected to 
12 



ON GARGOYLES 

do honour to God. But he forgot why he had 
collected them. He could not remember the de- 
sign or the object. He piled them all wildly 
into one heap fifty feet high; and when he had 
done it all the rich and influential went into a 
passion of applause and cried, " This is real art ! 
This is Realism! This is things as they really 

are!" 

• • • • • 

That, I fancy, is the only true origin of 
Realism. Realism is simply Romanticism that 
has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the 
sense of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its 
reason ; that is its reason for existing. The old 
Greeks summoned godlike things to worship 
their god. The mediseval Christians summoned 
all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, 
monkeys and madmen. The modem realists 
summon all these million creatures to worship 
their god ; and then have no god for them to 
worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty ; 
that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty 
created by controlling a million monsters of ugli- 
13 



ON GARGOYLES 

ness; and that in my belief was the zenith and 
the noon. Modern art and science practically 
mean having the million monsters and being un- 
able to control them ; and I will venture to call 
that the disruption and the decay. The finest 
lengths of the Elgin marbles consist of splendid 
horses going to the temple of a virgin. Chris- 
tianity, with its gargoyles and grotesques, really 
amounted to saying this : that a donkey could go 
before all the horses of the world when it was 
really going to the temple. Romance means a 
holy donkey going to the temple. Realism 
means a lost donkey going nowhere. 

The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting 
impression which are here collected are very like 
the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in a 
heap round my imaginary priest of the sun. 
They are very like that grey and gaping head 
of stone that I found overgrown with the grass. 
Yet I will venture to make even of these trivial 
fragments the high boast that I am a mediaevalist 
and not a modern. That is, I really have a no- 
tion of why I have collected all the nonsensical 
14 



ON GARGOYLES 

things there are. I have not the patience nor 
perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the 
connecting link between all these chaotic papers. 
But it could be stated. This row of shapeless 
and ungainly monsters which I now set before 
the reader does not consist of separate idols cut 
out capriciously in lonely valleys or various 
islands. These monsters are meant for the gar- 
goyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve 
the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else ; 
I leave to others the angels and the arches and 
the spires. But I am very sure of the style of 
the architecture and of the consecration of the 
church. 



15 



THE SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

Every man, though he were born in the very 
belfry of Bow and spent his infancy climbing 
among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere 
a country house which he has never seen; but 
which was built for him in the very shape of his 
soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found, 
knee-deep in orchards of Kent or mirrored in 
pools of Lincoln; and when the man sees it he 
remembers it, though he has never seen it before. 
Even I have been forced to confess this at last, 
who am a Cockney, if ever there was one, a Cock- 
ney not only on principle, but with savage pride. 
I have always maintained, quite seriously, that 
the Lord is not in the wind or thunder of the 
waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice of 
Fleet Street. I sincerely maintain that Nature- 
worship is more morally dangerous than the 
most vulgar man-worship of the cities ; since it 
can easily be perverted into the worship of an 
16 



SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

impersonal mystery, carelessness, or cruelty. 
Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he 
had devoted himself to a green-grocer instead 
of to greens. Swinburne would have been a bet- 
ter moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger 
instead of worshipping the sea. I prefer the 
philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philoso- 
phy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may 
be playful, but is seldom respectful. But when 
we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, to 
praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness 
of his conduct, the strong humility with which he 
is interlocked with his equals in silent mutual 
support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney 
metaphor, and call him a brick. 

But, despite all these theories, I have sur- 
rendered ; I have struck my colours at sight ; at 
a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. 
I shall come down to living in the country, like 
any common Socialist or Simple Lifer. I shall 
end my days in a village, in the character of the 
Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judg- 
ment to mankind. I have already learnt the 
17 



SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

rustic manner of leaning upon a gate ; and I was 
thus gymnastically occupied at the moment when 
my eye caught the house that was made for me. 
It stood well back from the road, and was built 
of a good yellow brick; it was narrow for its 
height, like the tower of some Border rob- 
ber; and over the front door was carved in 
large letters, " 1908." That last burst of 
sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian 
sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed 
my eyes in a kind of ecstasy. My friend 
(who was helping me to lean on the gate) 
asked me with some curiosity what I was 
doing. 

" My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, " I 
am bidding farewell to forty-three hansom cab- 
men." 

" Well," he said, " I suppose they would think 
this county rather outside the radius." 

" Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, " how 
beautiful London is! Why do they only write 
poetry about the country? I could turn every 
lyric cry into Cockney. 
18 



SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

* My heart leaps up when I behold 
A sky-sign in the sky,' 

as I observed in a volume which is too little read, 
founded on the older English poets. You never 
saw my ' Golden Treasury Regilded ; or, The 
Classics Made Cockney ' — ^it contained some fine 
lines. 

* O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,' 

or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning 

* City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.' 

I have written many such lines on the beauty of 
London; yet I never realised that London was 
really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why? 
It is because I have left it for ever." 

" If you will take my advice," said my friend, 
" you will humbly endeavour not to be a fool. 
What is the sense of this mad modern notion that 
every literary man must live in the country, with 
the pigs and the donkeys and the squires.'' 
Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden 
lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson 
came to London because they had had quite 
19 



SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

enough of the country. And as for trumpery 
topical journalists like you, why, they would cut 
their throats in the country. You have con- 
fessed it yourself in your own last words. You 
hunger and thirst after the streets; you think 
London the finest place on the planet. And if 
by some miracle a Bayswater omnibus could 
come down this green country lane you would 
utter a yell of joy." 

Then a light burst upon my brain, and I 
turned upon him with terrible sternness. 

" Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of 
thunder, " that is the true country spirit ! That 
is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does 
utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater 
omnibus. The real rustic does think London the 
finest place on the planet. In the few moments 
that I have stood by this stile, I have grown 
rooted here like an ancient tree ; I have been here 
for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the real 
rustic. I believe that the streets of London are 
paved with gold; and I mean to see it before I 
die." 



SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

The evening breeze freshened among the little 
tossing trees of that lane, and the purple evening 
clouds piled up and darkened behind my Country 
Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by 
contrast, its yellow bricks gleam like gold. At 
last my friend said : " To cut it short, then, you 
mean that you will live in the country because 
you won't like it. What on earth will you do 
here ; dig up the garden ? " 

" Dig ! " I answered, in honourable scorn. 
" Dig ! Do work at my Country Seat ; no, 
thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit 
in it. And for your other objection, you were 
quite wrong. I do not dislike the country, but 
I like the town more. Therefore the art of 
happiness certainly suggests that I should live in 
the country and think about the town. Modem 
nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and 
fields ought to be the ordinary things ; terraces 
and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am 
on the side of the man who lives in the country 
and wants to go to London. I abominate and 
abjure the man who lives in London and wants 
^1 



SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY 

to go to the country; I do it with all the more 
heartiness because I am that sort of man myself. 
We must learn to love London again, as rustics 
love it. Therefore (I quote again from the 
great Cockney version of The Golden Treas- 
ury)— 

* Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos stoves, 
Forbode not any severing of our loves. 
I have relinquished but your earthly sight, 
To hold you dear in a more distant way. 
I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet. 
Even more than when I lightly tripped as they. 
The grimy colour of the London clay 
Is lovely yet,' 

because I have found the house where I was 
really born ; the tall and quiet house from which 
I can see London afar off, as the miracle of man 
that it is." 



THE NIGHTMARE 

A SUNSET of copper and gold had just broken 
down and gone to pieces in the west, and grey 
colours were crawling over everything in earth 
and heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind 
that laid a cold finger upon flesh and spirit. 
The bushes at the back of my garden began to 
whisper like conspirators ; and then to wave like 
wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by 
the last light that died on the lawn a long poem 
of the decadent period, a poem about the old 
gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing 
and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal 
faces. 

" Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued the 
Hebrews and was splashed 
With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green 
beryls for her eyes ? " 

I read this poem because I had to review it for 
the Daily News; still it was genuine poetry of 



THE NIGHTMARE 

its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a 
fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed 
really to come from the Bondage of Egypt or 
the Burden of Tyre. There is not much in com- 
mon (thank God) between my garden with the 
grey-green English sky-line beyond it, and these 
mad visions of painted palaces, huge, headless 
idols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden 
sand. Nevertheless (as I confessed to myself) 
I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such 
smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset 
really looks like one of their ruined temples: a 
shattered heap of gold and green marble. A 
black flapping thing detaches itself from one of 
the sombre trees and flutters to another. I 
know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could 
fancy it was a black cherub, an infernal cherub 
of darkness, not with the wings of a bird and 
the head of a baby, but with the head of a gob- 
lin and the wings of a bat. I think, if there 
were light enough, I could sit here and write 
some very creditable creepy tale, about how I 
went up the crooked road beyond the church 



THE NIGHTMARE 

and met Something — say a dog, a dog with one 
eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps, a 
horse without a rider ; the horse also would have 
one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be 
broken ; I should meet a man (need I say, a one- 
eyed man?) who would ask me the way to my 
own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was 
burnt to the ground. I think I could tell a 
very cosy little tale along some such lines. Or 
I might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark 
trees above me. They are so tall that I feel 
as if I should find at their tops the nests of the 
angels ; but in this mood they would be dark and 
dreadful angels ; angels of death. 

Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do 
not believe in it in the least. That one-eyed uni- 
verse, with its one-eyed men and beasts, was only 
created with one universal wink. At the top of 
the tragic trees I should not find the Angel's 
Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest; the 
dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the 
Mare's Nest I shall discover that dim, enormous 
25 



THE NIGHTMARE 

opalescent egg from which is hatched the Night- 
mare. For there is nothing so delightful as a 
nightmare — when you know it is a nightmare. 

That is the essential. That is the stem con- 
dition laid upon all artists touching this luxury 
of fear. The terror must be fundamentally friv- 
olous. Sanity may play with insanity; but in- 
sanity must not be allowed to play with sanity. 
Let such poets as the one I was reading in the 
garden, by all means, be free to imagine what 
outrageous deities and violent landscapes they 
like. By all means let them wander freely amid 
their opium pinnacles and perspectives. But 
these huge gods, these high cities, are toys; 
they must never for an instant be allowed to be 
anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must 
play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and 
with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of 
the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from 
it. By all means, let him take up the Burden of 
Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But 
the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. 
His central sanctities, his true possessions, 
^6 



THE NIGHTMARE 

should be Christian and simple. And just as a 
child would cherish most a wooden horse or a 
sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the 
great child, must cherish most the old plain 
things of poetry and piety ; that horse of wood 
that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross of 
wood that redeemed and conquered the world. 

In one of Stevenson's letters there is a charac- 
teristically humorous remark about the ap- 
palling impression produced on him in childhood 
by the beasts with many eyes in the Book of 
Revelations : " If that was heaven, what in the 
name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in 
sober truth there is a magnificent idea in these 
monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, 
the idea that beings really more beautiful or 
more universal than we are might appear to us 
frightful and even confused. Especially they 
might seem to have senses at once more multiplex 
and more staring; an idea very imaginatively 
seized in the multitude of eyes. I like those 
monsters beneath the throne very much. But 

n 



THE NIGHTMARE 

I like them beneath the throne. It is when one 
of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a 
throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and 
there is (literally) the devil to pay — to pay in 
dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as 
those misshapen elemental powers are around the 
throne, remember that the thing that they wor- 
ship is the likeness of the appearance of a man. 
That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the sub- 
ject of Tales of Terror and such things, which 
unless a man of letters do well and truly be- 
lieve, without doubt he will end by blowing his 
brains out or by writing badly. Man, the cen- 
tral pillar of the world, must be upright and 
straight; around him all the trees and beasts 
and elements and devils may crook and curl like 
smoke if they choose. All really imaginative 
literature is only the contrast between the weird 
curves of Nature and the straightness of the 
soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if 
he is sure that he will not worship it ; but there 
are some so weak that they will worship a thing 
only because it is ugly. These must be chained 
2S 



THE NIGHTMARE 

to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to 
go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest prom- 
ontory and look down at hell. It is when you 
look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has 
probably been made. 

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the 
Nightmare to-night ; she whinnies to me from the 
rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will 
catch her and ride her through the awful air. 
Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots 
in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with 
us over the moon, like that wild amorous cow 
whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to 
that mad infinite where there is neither up nor 
down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. 
I will answer the call of chaos and old night. 
I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not 
ride on me. 



S9 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

My friend and I were walking in one of those 
wastes of pine-wood which make inland seas of 
solitude in every part of Western Europe ; which 
have the true terror of a desert, since they are 
uniform, and so one may lose one's way in them. 
Stiif, straight, and similar, stood up all around 
us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent 
mutiny. There is a truth in talking of the vari- 
ety of Nature ; but I think that Nature often 
shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. 
There is a weird rhythm in this very repeti- 
tion; it is as if the earth were resolved to 
repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn 
terrible. 

Have you ever tried the experiment of saying 
some plain word, such as " dog," thirty times ? 
By the thirtieth time it has become a word like 
" snark " or " pobble." It does not become 
tame, it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

a dog walks about as startling and undecipher- 
able as Leviathan or Croquemitaine. 

It may be that this explains the repetitions in 
Nature ; it may be for this reason that there are 
so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps 
they are not repeated so that they may grow 
familiar. Perhaps they are repeated only in the 
hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. 
Perhaps a man is not startled at the first cat he 
sees, but jumps into the air with surprise at the 
seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass 
through thousands of pine trees before he finds 
the one that is really a pine tree. However this 
may be, there is something singularly thrilling, 
even something urgent and intolerant, about the 
endless forest repetitions; there is the hint of 
something like madness in that musical monot- 
ony of the pines. 

I said something like this to my friend; and 
he answered with sardonic truth, " Ah, you wait 
till we come to a telegraph post." 

My friend was right, as he occasionally is in 
31 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

our discussions, especially upon points of fact. 
We had crossed the pine forest by one of its 
paths which happened to follow the wires of the 
provincial telegraphy ; and though the poles oc- 
curred at long intervals they made a difference 
when they came. The instant we came to the 
straight pole we could see that the pines were 
not really straight. It was like a hundred 
straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all 
brought to judgment suddenly by one straight 
line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur lines 
seemed to reel to right and left. A moment be- 
fore I could have sworn they stood as straight as 
lances ; now I could see them curve and waver 
everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Com- 
pared with the telegraph post the pines were 
crooked — and alive. That lonely vertical rod 
at once deformed and enfranchised the forest. 
It tangled it all together and yet made it free, 
like any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly. 
" Yes," said my gloomy friend, answering my 
thoughts. " You don't know w^hat a wicked 
shameful thing straightness is if you think these 
32 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

trees are straight. You never will know till 
your precious intellectual civilisation builds a 
forty-mile forest of telegraph poles." 

We had started walking from our temporary 
home later in the day than we intended ; and the 
long afternoon was already lengthening itself 
out into a yellow evening when we came out of 
the forest on to the hills above a strange town 
or village, of which the lights had already begun 
to glitter in the darkening valley. The change 
had already happened which is the test and 
definition of evening. I mean that while the sky 
seemed still as bright, the earth was growing; 
blacker against it, especially at the edges, the 
hills and the pine-tops. This brought out yet 
more clearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods ; 
and my friend cast a regretful glance at them 
as he came out under the sky. Then he turned 
to the view in front; and, as it happened, one 
of the telegraph posts stood up in front of him 
in the last sunlight. It was no longer crossed 
and softened by the more delicate lines of pine 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary, and angular 
as any crude figure in geometry. My friend 
stopped, pointing his stick at it, and all his 
anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips. 

" Demon," he said to me briefly, " behold your 
work. That palace of proud trees behind us is 
what the world was before you civilised men, 
Christians or democrats or the rest, came to 
make it dull with your dreary rules of morals 
and equality. In the silent fight of that forest, 
tree fights speechless against tree, branch 
against branch. And the upshot of that dumb 
battle is inequality — and beauty. Now lift up 
your eyes and look at equality and ugliness. 
See how regularly the white buttons are ar- 
ranged on that black stick, and defend your dog- 
mas if you dare." 

" Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of 
democracy.?" I asked. "I fancy that while 
three men have made the telegraph to get divi- 
dends, about a thousand men have preserved 
the forest to cut wood. But if the telegraph 
pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to 
34 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

doctrine but rather to commercial anarchy. If 
any one had a doctrine about a telegraph pole 
it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. 
Modern things are ugly, because modem men 
are careless, not because they are careful." 

" No," answered my friend with his eye on the 
end of a splendid and sprawling sunset, " there is 
something intrinsically deadening about the very 
idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always 
ugly. Beauty is always crooked. These rigid 
posts at regular intervals are ugly because they 
are carrying across the world the real message 
of democracy." 

" At this moment," I answered, " they are 
probably carrying across the world the message, 
' Buy Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the 
prompt communication between some two of the 
wealthiest and wickedest of His children with 
whom God has ever had patience. No ; these 
telegraph poles are ugly and detestable, they are 
inhuman and indecent. But their baseness lies 
in their privacy, not in their publicity. That 
black stick with white buttons is not the creation 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

of the soul of a multitude. It is the mad cre- 
ation of the souls of two millionaires." 

" At least you have to explain," answered my 
friend gravely, " how it is that the hard demo- 
cratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline 
have appeared together; you have . . . But 
bless my soul, we must be getting home. I had 
no idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this 
is our way through the wood. Come, let 
us both curse the telegraph post for entirely 
different reasons and get home before it is 
dark." 

We did not get home before it was dark. For 
one reason or another we had underestimated the 
swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night, 
especially in the threading of thick woods. 
When my friend, after the first five minutes' 
march, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutes 
after, had stuck nearly to the knees in mire, we 
began to have some suspicion of our direction. 
At last my friend said, in a low, husky voice: 

" I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's 
pitch dark." 

36 



THE TELEGRAPH POLES 

" I thought we went the right way," I said, 
tentatively. 

" Well," he said ; and then, after a long pause, 
" I can't see any telegraph poles. I've been 
looking for them." 

" So have I," I said. " They're so straight." 

We groped away for about two hours of dark- 
ness in the thick of the fringe of trees which 
seemed to dance round us in derision. Here 
and there, however, it was possible to trace the 
outline of something just too erect and rigid to 
be a pine tree. By these we finally felt our 
way home, arriving in a cold green twilight be- 
fore dawn. 



87 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

In a small grey town of stone in one of the great 
Yorkshire dales, which is full of history, I en- 
tered a hall and saw an old puppet-play exactly 
as our fathers saw it five hundred years ago. It 
was admirably translated from the old German, 
and was the original tale of Faust. The dolls 
were at once comic and convincing; but if you 
cannot at once laugh at a thing and believe in it, 
you have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in 
the world, for that matter. 

The puppet-play in question belongs, I be- 
lieve, to the fifteenth century; and indeed the 
whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour of 
that grotesque but somewhat gloomy time. It 
is very unfortunate that we so often know a 
thing that is past only by its tail end. We re- 
member yesterday only by its sunsets. There 
are many instances. One is Napoleon. We al- 
ways think of him as a fat old despot, ruling 
38 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

Europe with a ruthless military machine. But 
that, as Lord Rosebery would say, was only 
" The Last Phase " ; or at least the last but one. 
During the strongest and most startling part of 
his career, the time that made him immortal. 
Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort 
of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious, but 
honestly in love with a woman, and honestly 
enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French 
justice and equality. 

Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we 
also remember only by the odour of their 
ultimate decay. We think of the life of the 
Middle Ages as a dance of death, full of devils 
and deadly sins, lepers and burning heretics. 
But this was not the life of the Middle Ages, but 
the death of the Middle Ages. It is the spirit of 
Louis XI and Richard III, not of Louis IX and 
Edward I. 

This grim but not unwholesome fable of Dr. 

Faustus, with its rebuke to the mere arrogance 

of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but 

it is not a fair sample of the mediaeval soul at its 

39 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

happiest and sanest. The heart of the true 
Middle Ages might be found far better, for in- 
stance, in the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which 
the dead staff broke into leaf and flower to re- 
buke the pontiff who had declared even one hu- 
man being beyond the strength of sorrow and 
pardon. 

But there were in the play two great human 
ideas which the mediaeval mind never lost its grip 
on, through the heaviest nightmares of its dis- 
solution. They were the two great jokes of 
medisevalism, as they are the two eternal jokes 
of mankind. Wherever those two jokes exist 
there is a little health and hope; wherever they 
are absent, pride and insanity are present. The 
first is the idea that the poor man ought to get 
the better of the rich man. The other is 
the idea that the husband is afraid of the 
wife. 

I have heard that there is a place under the 
knee which, when struck, should produce a sort 
of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are 
40 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

mad. I am sure that there are some such places 
in the soul. When the human spirit does not 
jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, 
the human spirit must be struck with incurable 
paralysis. There is hope for people who have 
gone down into the hells of greed and economic 
oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are 
such a people ourselves), but there is no hope 
for a people that does not exult in the abstract 
idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There 
is hope for the idle and the adulterous, for the 
men that desert their wives and the men that 
beat their wives. But there is no hope for men 
who do not boast that their wives bully them. 
• • • • • 

The first idea, the idea about the man at the 
bottom coming out on top, is expressed in this 
puppet-play in the person of Dr. Faustus' 
servant, Caspar. Sentimental old Tories, re- 
gretting the feudal times, sometimes complain 
that in these days Jack is as good as his master. 
But most of the actual tales of the feudal times 
turn on the idea that Jack is much better than 
41 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

his master, and certainly it is so in the case of 
Caspar and Faust. The play ends with the 
damnation of the learned and illustrious doctor, 
followed by a cheerful and animated dance by 
Caspar, who has been made watchman of the 
city. 

But there was a much keener stroke of 
mediasval irony earlier in the play. The learned 
doctor has been ransacking all the libraries of 
the earth to find a certain rare formula, now 
almost unknown, by which he can control the 
infernal deities. At last he procures the one 
precious volume, opens it at the proper page, 
and leaves it on the table while he seeks some 
other part of his magic equipment. The 
servant comes in, reads off the formula, and im- 
mediately becomes an emperor of the elemental 
spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He 
summons and dismisses them alternately with the 
rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed ; 
he keeps them flying between the doctor's house 
and their own more unmentionable residences till 
they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all 
4^ 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

the best of the Middle Ages in that ; the idea of 
the great levellers, luck and laughter ; the idea of 
a sense of humour defying and dominating hell. 
One of the best points in the play as per- 
formed in this Yorkshire town was that the 
servant Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire, in- 
stead of the German rustic dialect which he 
talked in the original. That also smacks of the 
good air of that epoch. In those old pictures 
and poems they always made things living by 
making them local. Thus, queerly enough, the 
one touch that was not in the old mediaeval ver- 
sion was the most mediaeval touch of all. 

That other ancient and Christian jest, that a 
wife is a holy terror, occurs in the last scene, 
where the doctor (who wears a fur coat through- 
out, to make him seem more offensively rich and 
refined) is attempting to escape from the aveng- 
ing demons, and meets his old servant in the 
street. The servant obligingly points out a 
house with a blue door, and strongly recom- 
mends Dr. Faustus to take refuge in it. " My 
43 



A DRAMA OF DOLLS 

old woman lives there," he says, " and the devils 
are more afraid of her than you are of them." 
Faustus does not take this advice, but goes on 
meditating and reflecting (which had been his 
mistake all along) until the clock strikes twelve, 
and dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven. So 
Faustus, in his fur coat, is carried away by little 
black imps ; and serve him right, for being an 
Intellectual. 



44 



THE MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

At a little station, which I decline to specify, 
somewhere between Oxford and Guildford, I 
missed a connection or miscalculated a route in 
such manner that I was left stranded for rather 
more than an hour. I adore waiting at railway 
stations, but this was not a very sumptuous 
specimen. There was nothing on the platform 
except a chocolate automatic machine, which 
eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no corre- 
sponding chocolate, and a small paper-stall with 
a few remaining copies of a cheap imperial 
organ which we will call the Daily Wire, It 
does not matter which imperial organ it was, as 
they all say the same thing. 

Though I knew it quite well already, I read it 
with gravity as I strolled out of the station and 
up the country road. It opened with the strik- 
ing phrase that the Radicals were setting class 
against class. It went on to remark that 
45 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

nothing had contributed more to make our Em- 
pire happy and enviable, to create that obvious 
list of glories which you can supply for your- 
self, the prosperity of all classes in our great 
cities, our populous and growing villages, the 
success of our rule in Ireland, etc., etc., than the 
sound Anglo-Saxon readiness of all classes in the 
State " to work heartily hand-in-hand." It was 
this alone, the paper assured me, that had saved 
us from the horrors of the French Revolution. 
" It is easy for the Radicals," it went on very 
solemnly, " to make jokes about the dukes. Very 
few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given 
to the poor one half of the earnest thought, tire- 
less unselfishness, and truly Christian patience 
that are given to them by the great landlords of 
this country. We are very sure that the Eng- 
lish people, with their sturdy common sense, 
will prefer to be in the hands of English gentle- 
men rather than in the miry claws of Socialistic 
buccaneers." 

Just when I had reached this point I nearly 
46 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

ran into a man. Despite the populousness and 
growth of our villages, he appeared to be the 
only man for miles, but the road up which I had 
wandered turned and narrowed with equal 
abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the 
gate on which he was leaning. I pulled up to 
apologise, and since he seemed ready for society, 
and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed 
the Daily Wire over a hedge and fell into speech 
with him. He wore a wreck of respectable 
clothes, and his face had that plebeian refinement 
which one sees in small tailors and watchmakers, 
in poor men of sedentary trades. Behind him a 
twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt 
and tattered as himself, but I do not think that 
the tragedy that he symbolised was a mere fancy 
from the spectral wood. There was a fixed look 
in his face which told that he was one of those 
who in keeping body and soul together have diffi- 
culties not only with the body, but also with the 
soul. 

He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the 
touching accent of those streets from which I am 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

an exile; but he had lived nearly all his life in 
this countryside; and he began to tell me the 
affairs of it in that formless, tail-foremost way 
in which the poor gossip about their great 
neighbours. Names kept coming and going in 
the narrative like charms or spells, unaccom- 
panied by any biographical explanation. In 
particular the name of somebody called Sir 
Joseph multiplied itself with the omnipresence of 
a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be the principal 
landowner of the district; and as the confused 
picture unfolded itself, I began to form a definite 
and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph 
He was spoken of in a strange way, frigid and 
yet familiar, as a child might speak of a step- 
mother or an unavoidable nurse; something in- 
timate, but by no means tender ; something that 
was waiting for you by your own bed and board ; 
that told you to do this and forbade you to do 
that, with a caprice that was cold and yet some- 
how personal. It did not appear that Sir 
Joseph was popular, but he was " a household 
word." He was not so much a public man as a 
48 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

sort of private god or omnipotence. The par- 
ticular man to whom I spoke said he had " been 
in trouble," and that Sir Joseph had been 
" pretty hard on him." 

And under that grey and silver cloudland, 
with a background of those frost-bitten and 
wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me 
a tale which, true or false, was as heartrending 
as Romeo and Juliet. 

• a • • • 

He had slowly built up in the village a small 
business as a photographer, and he was engaged 
to a girl at one of the lodges, whom he loved 
with passion. " I'm the sort that 'ad better 
marry," he said; and for all his frail figure I 
knew what he meant. But Sir Joseph, and 
especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want a 
photographer in the village; it made the girls 
vain, or perhaps they disliked this particular 
photographer. He worked and worked until 
he had just enough to marry on honestly; and 
almost on the eve of his wedding the lease ex- 
pired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. 
49 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

He refused to renew the lease; and the man 
went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph was 
ubiquitous; and the whole of that place was 
barred against him. In all that country he 
could not find a shed to which to bring home 
his bride. The man appealed and explained; 
but he was disliked as a demagogue, as well as a 
photographer. Then it was as if a black cloud 
came across the winter sky ; for I knew what 
was coming. I forget even in what words he 
told of Nature maddened and set free. But I 
still see, as in a photograph, the grey muscles 
of the winter trees standing out like tight ropes, 
as if all Nature were on the rack. 

" She 'ad to go away," he said. 

" Wouldn't her parents," I began, and hes- 
itated on the word " forgiA^e." 

" Oh, her people forgave her," he said. 
" But Her Ladyship " 

" Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and 
stars," I said, impatiently. " So of course she 
can come between a mother and the child of her 
body." 

50 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

" Well, it does seem a bit 'ard . . ." he be- 
gan with a break in his voice. 

" But, good Lord, man," I cried, " it isn't a 
matter of hardness ! It's a matter of impious 
and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph 
knew the passions he was playing with, he did 
you a wrong for which in many Christian coun- 
tries he would have a knife in him." 

The man continued to look across the frozen 
fields with a frown. He certainly told his tale 
with real resentment, whether it was true or 
false, or only exaggerated. He was certainly 
sullen and injured; but he did not seem to 
think of any avenue of escape. At last he 
said : 

" Well, it's a bad world ; let's 'ope there's a 
better one." 

" Amen," I said. " But when I think of Sir 
Joseph, I understand how men have hoped there 
was a worse one." 

Then we were silent for a long time and felt 
the cold of the day crawling up, and at last I 
said, abruptly: 

51 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

" The other day at a Budget meeting, I 
heard " 

He took his elbows off the stile and seemed 
to change from head to foot like a man com- 
ing out of sleep with a yawn. He said in a 
totally new voice, louder but much more care- 
less, " Ah, yes, sir, . . . this 'ere Budget . . . 
the Radicals are doing a lot of 'arm." 

I listened intently, and he went on. He said 
with a sort of careful precision, " Settin' class 
against class ; that's what I call it. Why, 
what's made our Empire except the readiness of 
all classes to work 'eartily 'and-in-'and.? " 

He walked a little up and down the lane and 
stamped with the cold. Then he said, " What 
I say is, what else kept us from the 'errors of 
the French Revolution? " 

My memory is good, and I waited in tense 
eagerness for the phrase that came next. " They 
may laugh at dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf 
as kind and Christian and patient as lots of the 
landlords are. Let me tell you, sir," he said, 
facing round at me with the final air of one 
52 



MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER 

launching a paradox. " The English people 
'ave some common sense, and they'd rather be 
in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws of 
a lot of Socialist thieves." 

I had an indescribable sense that I ought to 
applaud, as if I were a public meeting. The 
insane separation in the man's soul between his 
experience and his ready-made theory was but 
a type of what covers a quarter of England. 
As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire stick- 
ing out of his shabby pocket. He bade me 
farewell in quite a blaze of catchwords, and 
went stumping up the road. I saw his figure 
grow smaller and smaller in the great green 
landscape; even as the Free Man has grown 
smaller and smaller in the English countryside. 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

I WAS walking the other day in a kitchen garden, 
which I find has somehow got attached to my 
premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. 
After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came 
to the conclusion that I like a kitchen garden 
because it contains things to eat. I do not 
mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen 
garden is often very beautiful. The mixture 
of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage 
is much subtler and grander than the mere 
freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and 
violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely 
meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. 
A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard ; 
but why is it that the word " orchard " sounds 
as beautiful as the word " flower-garden," and 
yet also sounds more satisfactory? I suggest 
again my extraordinarily dark and delicate dis- 
covery : that it contains things to eat. 
54 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

The cabbage is a solid ; it can be approached 
from all sides at once; it can be realised by all 
senses at once. Compared with that the sun- 
flower, which can only be seen, is a mere pat- 
tern, a thing painted on a flat wall. Now, it is 
this sense of the solidity of things that can only 
be uttered by the metaphor of eating. To ex- 
press the cubic content of a turnip, you must 
be all round it at once. The only way to get 
all round a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. 
I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity, 
the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, 
the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished 
that they were things to eat. If only brown 
peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white 
fir-wood were digestible ! We talk rightly of 
giving stones for bread: but there are in the 
Geological Museum certain rich crimson mar- 
bles, certain split stones of blue and green, that 
make me wish my teeth were stronger. 

Somebody staring into the sky with the same 
ethereal appetite declared that the moon was 
made of green cheese. I never could conscien- 
55 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

tiously accept the full doctrine. I am Modern- 
ist in this matter. That the moon is made of 
cheese I have believed from childhood; and in 
the course of every month a giant (of my ac- 
quaintance) bites a big round piece out of it. 
This seems to me a doctrine that is above rea- 
son, but not contrary to it. But that the cheese 
is green seems to be in some degree actually 
contradicted hj the senses and the reason ; first 
because if the moon were made of green cheese 
it would be inhabited; and second because if it 
were made of green cheese it would be green. A 
blue moon is said to be an unusual sight ; but I 
cannot think that a green one is much more 
common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon 
looking like every other sort of cheese except a 
green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a 
cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a 
warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent. 
I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, 
rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and 
dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it look 
like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an 
56 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky ; and I have 
once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking, so 
strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere 
cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has hor- 
rible holes in it, as if it had come in boiling un- 
natural milk from mysterious and unearthly 
cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar 
cheese green; and I incline to the opinion that 
the moon is not old enough. The moon, like 
everything else, will ripen by the end of the 
world; and in the last days we shall see it tak- 
ing on those volcanic sunset colours, and leap- 
ing with that enormous and fantastic life. 

But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps 
slightly lacking in prosaic actuality. What- 
ever may be the value of the above speculations, 
the phrase about the moon and green cheese 
remains a good example of this imagery of eat- 
ing and drinking on a large scale. The same 
huge fancy is in the phrase " if all the trees 
were bread and cheese " which I have cited else- 
where in this connection ; and in that noble 
nightmare of a Scandinavian legend, in which 
57 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a 
horn. In an essay like the present (first in- 
tended as a paper to be read before the Royal 
Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will 
concede that my theory of the gradual vires- 
cence of our satellite is to be regarded rather 
as an alternative theory than as a law finally 
demonstrated and universally accepted by the 
scientific world. It is a hypothesis that holds 
the field, as the scientists say of a theory when 
there is no evidence for it so far. 

But the reader need be under no apprehension 
that I have suddenly gone mad, and shall start 
biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees ; 
or seriously altering (by large semicircular 
mouthfuls) the exquisite outline of the moun- 
tains. This feeling for expressing a fresh 
solidity by the image of eating is really a very 
old one. So far from being a paradox of per- 
versity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of 
religion. If any one wandering about wants to 
have a good trick or test for separating the 
wrong idealism from the right, I will give him 
58 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion 
that it is always trying to express concrete facts 
as abstract ; it calls sex affinity ; it calls wine al- 
cohol; it calls brute starvation the economic 
problem. The test of true religion is that its 
energy drives exactly the other way; it is al- 
ways trying to make men feel truths as facts; 
always trying to make abstract things as plain 
and solid as concrete things ; always trying to 
make men, not merely admit the truth, but see, 
smell, handle, hear, and devour the truth. All 
great spiritual scriptures are full of the in- 
vitation not to test, but to taste; not to ex- 
amine, but to eat. Their phrases are full of 
living water and heavenly bread, mysterious 
manna and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and 
the polite society of the world, has despised this 
instinct of eating; but religion has never 
despised it. When we look at a firm, fat, 
white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not suggest 
that we should desire to eat it; that would be 
highly abnormal. But I really mean that we 
should think it good to eat ; good for some one 
59 



THE APPETITE OF EARTH 

else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating 
it ; the grass that grows upon its top is devour- 
ing it silently, but, doubtless, with an up- 
roarious appetite. 



60 



SIMMONS AND THE SOCIAL TIE 

It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, 
that we need to have an ideal in our minds with 
which to test all realities. But it is equally 
true, and less noted, that we need a reality 
with which to test ideals. Thus I have selected 
Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, as the 
touchstone of all modem theories about the 
mass of women. Her name is not Buttons ; she 
is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely a 
comic figure. She has a powerful stoop and 
an ugly, attractive face, a little like that of 
Huxley — without the whiskers, of course. The 
courage with which she supports the most 
brutal bad luck has something quite creepy 
about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive ; 
her practical charity very large; and she is 
wholly unaware of the philosophical use to 
which I put her. 

But when I hear the modern generalisations 
61 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

about her sex on all sides I simply substitute 
her name, and see how the thing sounds then. 
When on the one side the mere sentimentalist 
says, " Let woman be content to be dainty and 
exquisite, a protected piece of social art and 
domestic ornament," then I merely repeat it to 
myself in the other form, " Let Mrs. Buttons 
be content to be dainty and exquisite, a pro- 
tected piece of social art, etc." It is extraor- 
dinary what a difference the substitution seems 
to make. And on the other hand, when some 
of the Suffragettes say in their pamphlets and 
speeches, " Woman, leaping to life at the trum- 
pet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry 
luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of 
empire and the firebrand of speculative 
thought " — in order to understand such a sen- 
tence I say it over again in the amended form: 
" Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet 
call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry lux- 
uries and demands to grasp the sceptre of em- 
pire and the firebrand of speculative thought." 
Somehow it sounds quite different. And yet 
62 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

when you say Woman I suppose you mean the 
average woman; and if most women are as 
capable and critical and morally sound as Mrs. 
Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and a 
great deal more than we deserve. 

But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons ; she 
would require many studies. I will take a less 
impressive case of my principle, the principle of 
keeping in the mind an actual personality when 
we are talking about types or tendencies or 
generalised ideals. Take, for example, the 
question of the education of boys. Almost 
every post brings me pamphlets expounding 
some advanced and suggestive scheme of educa- 
tion; the pupils are to be taught separate; the 
sexes are to be taught together; there should 
be no prizes ; there should be no pun- 
ishments ; the master should lift the boys 
to his level; the master should descend to 
their level; we should encourage the heartiest 
comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest 
spiritual intimacy with masters; toil must be 
pleasant and holidays must be instructive ; with 
63 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

all these things I am daily impressed and some- 
what bewildered. 

But on the great Buttons' principle I keep in 
my mind and apply to all these ideals one still 
vivid fact; the face and character of a par- 
ticular schoolboy whom I once knew. I am not 
taking a mere individual oddity, as you will 
hear. He was exceptional, and yet the reverse 
of eccentric; he was (in a quite sober and strict 
sense of the words) exceptionally average. He 
was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a 
certain spirit which is the common spirit of 
boys, but which nowhere else became so obvious 
and outrageous. And because he was an in- 
carnation he was, in his way, a tragedy. 

I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, 
healthy figure, strong, but a little slouching, 
and there was in his walk something between a 
slight swagger and a seaman's roll; he com- 
monly had his hands in his pockets. His hair 
was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and 
his face, if one saw it after his figure, was some- 
64 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

thing of a surprise. For while the form might 
be called big and braggart, the face might have 
been called weak, and was certainly worried. It 
was a hesitating face, which seemed to blink 
doubtfully in the daylight. He had even the 
look of one who has received a buffet that he 
cannot return. In all occupations he was the 
average boy; just sufficiently good at sports, 
just sufficiently bad at work to be universally 
satisfactory. But he was prominent in noth- 
ing, for prominence was to him a thing like 
bodily pain. He could not endure, without dis- 
comfort amounting to desperation, that any 
boy should be noticed or sensationally separated 
from the long line of boys; for him, to be dis- 
tinguished was to be disgraced. 

Those who interpret schoolboys as merely 
wooden and barbarous, unmoved by anything 
but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, 
make the mistake of forgetting how much of the 
schoolboy life is public and ceremonial, having 
reference to an ideal; or, if you like, to an af- 
fectation. Boys, like dogs, have a sort of ro- 
65 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

mantic ritual which is not always their real 
selves. And this romantic ritual is generally 
the ritual of not being romantic ; the pretence 
of being much more masculine and materialistic 
than they are. Boys in themselves are very 
sentimental. The most sentimental thing in the 
world is to hide your feelings ; it is making too 
much of them. Stoicism is the direct product 
of sentimentalism ; and schoolboys are senti- 
mental individually, but stoical collectively. 

For example, there were numbers of boys at 
my school besides myself who took a private 
pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not 
have induced most of us to admit this to the 
masters, or to repeat poetry with the faintest 
inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That 
would have been anti-social egoism; we called 
it " showing off." I myself remember running 
to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with 
mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of 
Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmion or 
the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating 
the same lines in class with the colourless deco- 
66 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

rum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be 
invisible in our uniformity; a mere pattern of 
Eton collars and coats. 

But Simmons went even further. He felt it 
as an insult to brotherly equality if any task 
or knowledge out of the ordinary track was dis- 
covered even by accident. If a boy had learnt 
German in infancy ; or if a boy knew some 
terms in music ; or if a boy was forced to feebly 
confess that he had read " The Mill on the 
Floss " — then Simmons was in a perspiration 
of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still 
less any petty jealousy; what he felt was an 
honourable and generous shame. He hated it 
as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it 
made him want to hide himself. Just that feel- 
ing of impersonal ignominy which most of us 
have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, 
Simmons had when some one betrayed special 
knowledge. He writhed and went red in the 
face; he used to put up the lid of his desk to 
hide his blushes for human dignity, and from 
67 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

behind this barrier would whisper protests 
which had the hoarse emphasis of pain. " O, 
shut up, I say. . . . O, I say, shut up. . . . 
O, shut it, can't you ? " Once when a little boy 
admitted that he had heard of the Highland 
claymore, Simmons literally hid his head inside 
his desk and dropped the lid upon it in despera- 
tion; and when I was for a moment transferred 
from the bottom of the form for knowing the 
name of Cardinal Newman, I thought he would 
have rushed from the room. 

His psychological eccentricity increased; if 
one can call that an eccentricity which was a 
wild worship of the ordinary. At last he grew 
so sensitive that he could not even bear any 
question answered correctly without grief. He 
felt there was a touch of disloyalty, of un- 
fraternal individualism, even about knowing the 
right answer to a sum. If asked the date of 
the battle of Hastings, he considered it due to 
social tact and general good feeling to answer 
1067. This chivalrous exaggeration led to 
bad feeling between him and the school author- 
68 



SIMMONS AND SOCIAL TIE 

itj, which ended in a rupture unexpectedly 
violent in the case of so good-humoured a 
creature. He fled from the school, and it was 
discovered upon inquiry that he had fled from 
his home also. 

I never expected to see him again ; yet it is 
one of the two or three odd coincidences of my 
life that I did see him. At some public sports 
or recreation ground I saw a group of rather 
objectless youths, one of whom was wearing the 
dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. 
Inside that uniform was the tall figure, shy face, 
and dark, stiff* hair of Simmons. He had gone 
to the one place where every one is dressed alike 
— a regiment. I know nothing more ; perhaps 
he was killed in Africa. But when England 
was full of flags and false triumphs, when every- 
body was talking unmanly trash about the 
whelps of the lion and the brave boys in red, I 
often heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns 
of my memory, " Shut up ... O, shut up 
. . . O, I say, shut it." 



m 



CHEESE 

My forthcoming work in five volumes, " The 
Neglect of Cheese in European Literature," is 
a work of such unprecedented and laborious de- 
tail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. 
Some overflowings from such a fountain of in- 
formation may therefore be permitted tc 
sprinkle these pages. I cannot yet wholly ex- 
plain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have 
been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. 
Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several 
times, but with too much Roman restraint. He 
does not let himself go on cheese. The only 
other poet I can think of just now who seems to 
have had some sensibility on the point was the 
nameless author of the nursery rhyme which 
says : " If all the trees were bread and 
cheese " — which is, indeed, a rich and gigantic 
vision of the liigher gluttony. If all the trees 
were bread and cheese there would be consider- 
70 



CHEESE 

able deforestation-in any part of England where 
I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would 
reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran 
after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anony- 
mous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. 
Yet it has every quality which we require in ex- 
alted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it 
rhymes to "breeze" and "seas" (an essential 
point) ; that it is emphatic in sound is admitted 
even by the civilisation of the modem cities. 
For their citizens, with no apparent intention 
except emphasis, will often say, " Cheese it ! " 
or even " Quite the cheese." The substance it- 
self is imaginative. It is ancient — sometimes in 
the individual case, always in the type and cus- 
tom. It is simple, being directly derived from 
milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not 
lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You 
know, I hope (though I myself have only just 
thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden 
were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated 
waters only appeared after the Fall. 

But cheese has another quality, which is also 
71 



CHEESE 

the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring 
to lecture in several places at once, I made an 
eccentric journey across England, a journey of 
so irregular and even illogical shape that it 
necessitated my having lunch on four successive 
days in four roadside inns in four different 
counties. In each inn they had nothing but 
bread and cheese ; nor can I imagine why a man 
should want more than bread and cheese, if he 
can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese 
was good; and in each inn it was different. 
There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in York- 
shire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. 
Now, it is just here that true poetic civilisation 
differs from that paltry and mechanical civili- 
sation which holds us all in bondage. Bad 
customs are universal and rigid, like modern 
militarism. Good customs are universal and 
varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. 
Both the good and bad civilisation cover us as 
with a canopy, and protect us from all that is 
outside. But a good civilisation spreads over 
us freely like a, tree, varying and yielding be^ 

n 



CHEESE 

cause it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up 
and sticks out above us like an umbrella — arti- 
ficial, mathematical in shape ; not merely uni- 
versal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast 
between the substances that vary and the sub- 
stances that are the same wherever they pene- 
trate. By a wise doom of heaven men were 
commanded to eat cheese, but not the same 
cheese. Being really universal it varies from 
valley to valley. But if, let us say, we com- 
pare cheese with soap (that vastly inferior sub- 
stance), we shall see that soap tends more and 
more to be merely Smith's Soap or Brown's 
Soap, sent automatically all over the world. 
If the Red Indians have soap it is Smith's Soap. 
If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown's soap. 
There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, 
nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his soap. I 
fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he 
is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a 
local cheese, having some real relation to his 
life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned 
foods, patent medicines are sent all over the 
73 



CHEESE 

world; but they are not produced all over the 
world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead 
identity, never that soft play of slight variation 
which exists in things produced everywhere out 
of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits 
of the orchard. You can get a whisky and 
soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is 
why so many Empire-builders go mad. But 
you are not tasting or touching any environ- 
ment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the 
grapes of the Rhine. You are not approach- 
ing Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, 
as in the holy act of eating cheese. 

When I had done my pilgrimage in the four 
wayside public-houses I reached one of the 
great northern cities, and there I proceeded, 
with great rapidity and complete inconsistency, 
to a large and elaborate restaurant, where I 
knew I could get many other things besides 
bread and cheese. I could get that also, how- 
ever ; or at least I expected to get it ; but I was 
sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, 
and left England behind. The waiter brought 
74? 



CHEESE 

me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into con- 
temptibly small pieces ; and it is the awful fact 
that, instead of Christian bread, he brought 
me biscuits. Biscuits — to one who had eaten 
the cheese of four great countrysides! Bis- 
cuits — to one who had proved anew for himself 
the sanctity of the ancient wedding between 
cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in 
warm and moving terms. I asked him who he 
was that he should put asunder those whom 
Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did 
not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding 
substance like cheese went naturally with a 
solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it 
off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked 
him if, when he said his prayers, he was so 
supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. 
He gave me generally to understand that he 
was only obeying a custom of Modem Society. 
I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not 
against the waiter, but against Modern So- 
ciety, for this huge and unparalleled modern 
wrong. 

75 



THE RED TOWN 

When a man says that democracy is false be- 
cause most people are stupid, there are several 
courses which the philosopher may pursue. The 
most obvious is to hit him smartly and with 
precision on the exact tip of the nose. But if 
you have scruples (moral or physical) about 
this course, you may proceed to employ Rea- 
son, which in this case has all the savage solid- 
ity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say 
that " most people " are stupid. It is like say- 
ing " most people are tall," when it is obvious 
that " tall " can only mean taller than most 
people. It is absurd to denounce the majority 
of mankind as below the average of man- 
kind. 

Should the man have been hammered on the 

nose and brained with logic, and should he still 

remain cold, a third course opens: lead him by 

the hand (himself half-willing) towards some 

76 



THE RED TOWN 

sunlit and yet secret meadow and ask him who 
made the names of the common wild flowers. 
They were ordinary people, so far as any one 
knows, who gave to one flower the name of the 
Star of Bethlehem and to another and much 
commoner flower the tremendous title of the 
Eye of Day. If you cling to the snobbish 
notion that common people are prosaic, ask any 
common person for the local names of the 
flowers, names which vary not only from 
county to county, but even from dale to 
dale. 

But, curiously enough, the case is much 
stronger than this. It will be said that this 
poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and 
that the dim democracies of our modern towns 
at least have lost it. For some extraordinary 
reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London 
slang is full of witty things said by nobody in 
particular. True, the creed of our cruel cities 
is not so sane and just as the creed of the old 
countryside; but the people are just as clever 
77 



THE RED TOWN 

in giving names to their sins in the city as in 
giving names to their joys in the wilderness. 
One could not better sum up Christianity than 
by calling a small white insignificant flower 
" The Star of Bethlehem." But then, again, 
one could not better sum up the philos- 
ophy deduced from Darwinism than in the 
one verbal picture of " having your monkey 
up." 

Who first invented these violent felicities of 
language? Who first spoke of a man "being 
off his head"? The obvious comment on a 
lunatic is that his head is off him ; yet the other 
phrase is far more fantastically exact. There 
is about every madman a singular sensation 
that his body has walked off and left the im- 
portant part of him behind. 

But the cases of this popular perfection in 
phrase are even stronger when they are more 
vulgar. What concentrated irony and imagina- 
tion there is, for instance, in the metaphor 
which describes a man doing a midnight flitting 
as " shooting the moon " ? It expresses every- 
78 



THE RED TOWN 

thing about the runaway: his eccentric occupa- 
tion, his improbable explanations, his furtive 
air as of a hunter, his constant glances at the 
blank clock in the sky. 

No; the English democracy is weak enough 
about a number of things ; for instance, it is 
very weak in politics. But there is no doubt 
that the democracy is wonderfully strong in 
literature. Very few books that the cultured 
class has produced of late have been such good 
literature as the expression " painting the town 
red." 

Oddly enough, this last Cockney epigram 
clings to my memory. For as I was walking 
a little while ago round a corner near Victoria 
I realised for the first time that a familiar lamp- 
post was painted all over with a bright ver- 
milion, just as if it were trying (in spite of ob- 
vious bodily disqualifications) to pretend that 
it was a pillar-box. I have since heard official 
explanations of these startling and scarlet ob- 
jects. But my first fancy was that some dis- 
79 



THE RED TOWN 

sipated gentleman on his way home at four 
o'clock in the morning had attempted to paint 
the town red and got only as far as one lamp- 
post. 

I began to make a fairy tale about the man ; 
and, indeed, this phrase contains both a fairy 
tale and a philosophy ; it really states almost 
the whole truth about those pure outbreaks of 
pagan enjoyment to which all healthy men have 
often been tempted. It expresses the desire to 
have levity on a large scale which is the es- 
sence of such a mood. The rowdy young man 
is not content to paint his tutor's door green: 
he would like to paint the whole city scarlet. 
The word which to us best recalls such 
gigantesque idiocy is the word " mafficking." 
The slaves of that saturnalia were not only 
painting the town red; they thought that they 
were painting the map red — that they were 
painting the world red. But, indeed, this Im- 
perial debauch has in it something worse than 
the mere larkiness which is my present topic; 
it has an element of real self-flattery and of sin. 
80 



THE RED TOWN 

The Jingo who wants to admire himself is worse 
than the blackguard who only wants to enjoy 
himself. In a very old ninth-century illumina- 
tion which I have seen, depicting the war of the 
rebel angels in heaven, Satan is represented as 
distributing to his followers peacock feathers — 
the symbols of an evil pride. Satan also dis- 
tributed peacock feathers to his followers on 
Mafeking Night. 

But taking the case of ordinary pagan reck- 
lessness and pleasure seeking, it is, as we have 
said, well expressed in this image. First, be- 
cause it conveys this notion of filling the world 
with one private folly ; and secondly, because of 
the profound idea involved in the choice of 
colour. Red is the most joyful and dreadful 
thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest 
note, it is the highest light, it is the place 
where the walls of this world of ours wear thin- 
nest and something beyond burns through. It 
glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire 
which destroys us, in the roses of our romance 
81 



THE RED TOWN 

and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands 
for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in 
first love. 

Now, the profligate is he who wishes to 
spread this crimson of conscious joy over every- 
thing; to have excitement at every moment; to 
paint everything red. He bursts a thousand 
barrels of wine to incarnadine the streets ; and 
sometimes (in his last madness) he will butcher 
beasts and men to dip his gigantic brushes in 
their blood. For it marks the sacredness of 
red in nature, that it is secret even when it is 
ubiquitous, like blood in the human body, which 
is omnipresent, yet invisible. As long as blood 
lives it is hidden ; it is only dead blood that we 
see. But the earlier parts of the rake's prog- 
ress are very natural and amusing. Painting 
the town red is a delightful thing until it is 
done. It would be splendid to see the cross of 
St. Paul's as red as the cross of St. George, and 
the gallons of red paint running down the dome 
or dripping from the Nelson Column. But 
when it is done, when you have painted the town 
82 



THE RED TOWN 

red, an extraordinary thing happens. You 
cannot see any red at all. 

I can see, as in a sort of vision, the successful 
artist standing in the midst of that frightful 
city, hung on all sides with the scarlet of his 
shame. And then, when everything is red, he 
will long for a red rose in a green hedge and 
long in vain; he will dream of a red leaf and 
be unable even to imagine it. He has des- 
ecrated the divine colour, and he can no longer 
see it, though it is all around. I see him, a 
single black figure against the red-hot hell that 
he has kindled, where spires and turrets stand 
up like immobile flames : he is stiff*ened in a sort 
of agony of prayer. Then the mercy of 
Heaven is loosened, and I see one or two flakes 
of snow very slowly begin to fall. 



THE FURROWS 

As I see the corn grow green all about my neigh- 
bourhood, there rushes on me for no reason in 
particular a memory of the winter. I say 
" rushes," for that is the very word for the old 
sweeping lines of the ploughed fields. From 
some accidental turn of a train-journey or a 
walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of 
the furrows. The furrows are like arrows ; 
they fly along an arc of sky. They are like 
leaping animals ; they vault an inviolable hill 
and roll down the other side. They are like 
battering battalions ; they rush over a hill with 
flying squadrons and carry it with a cavalry 
charge. They have all the air of Arabs sweep- 
ing a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of 
torrents sweeping a watercourse. Nothing ever 
seemed so living as those brown lines as they 
shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to 
their still whirl of the valley. They were swifter 
84 



THE FURROWS 

than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous 
and rejoicing than rockets. And jet they were 
only thin straight lines drawn with difficulty, 
like a diagram, by painful and patient men. 
The men that ploughed tried to plough 
straight; they had no notion of giving great 
sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts 
of cloven earth ; they were done by the grace of 
God. I had always rejoiced in them; but I had 
never found any reason for my joy. There are 
some very clever people who cannot enjoy the 
joy unless they understand it. There are other 
and even cleverer people who say that they lose 
the joy the moment they do understand it. 
Thank God I was never clever, and could al- 
w^ays enjoy things when I understood them and 
when I didn't. I can enjoy the orthodox Tory, 
though I could never understand him. I can 
also enjoy the orthodox Liberal, though I un- 
derstand him only too well. 

But the splendour of furrowed fields is this: 
that like all brave things they are made 
86 



THE FURROWS 

straight, and therefore they bend. In every- 
thing that bows gracefully there must be an ef- 
fort at stiffness. Bows are beautiful when they 
bend only because they try to remain rigid; 
and sword-blades can curl like silver ribbons 
only because they are certain to spring straight 
again. But the same is true of every tough 
curve of the tree-tunk, of every strong-backed 
bend of the bough; there is hardly any such 
thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. 
Rigidity yielding a little, like justice swayed by 
mercy, is the whole beauty of the earth. The 
cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out 
of shape. Everything tries to be straight ; and 
everything just fortunately fails. 

The foil may curve in the lunge ; but there is 
nothing beautiful about beginning the battle 
with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the 
strong doctrine, may give a little in the actual 
fight with facts ; but that is no reason for be- 
ginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. 
Do not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic 
at all the opportunities; fate can be trusted to 
86 



THE FURROWS 

do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try 
to bend, any more than the trees try to bend. 
Try to grow straight, and life will bend you. 

Alas ! I am giving the moral before the fable ; 
and yet I hardly think that otherwise you could 
see all that I mean in that enormous vision of 
the ploughed hills. These great furrowed 
slopes are the oldest architecture of man: the 
oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest 
botany his object. And for geometry, the mere 
word proves my case. 

But when I looked at those torrents of 
ploughed parallels, that great rush of rigid 
lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achieve- 
ment of democracy. Here was mere equality: 
but equality seen in bulk is more superb than 
any supremacy. Equality free and flying, 
equality rushing over hill and dale, equality 
charging the world — that was the meaning of 
those military furrows, military in their 
identity, military in their energy. They sculp- 
tured hill and dale with strong curves merely 
87 



THE FURROWS 

because they did not mean to curve at all. 
They made the strong lines of landscape with 
their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not 
only nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man 
has spoilt the country. IMan has created the 
country; it was his business, as the image of 
God. No hill, covered with common scrub or 
patches of purple heath, could have been so 
sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the 
ranked furrows rose like aspiring angels. No 
valley, confused with needless cottages and 
towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as 
that abyss into which the down-rushing furrows 
raged like demons into the swirling pit. 

It is the hard lines of discipline and equality 
that mark out a landscape and give it all its 
mould and meaning. It is just because the lines 
of the furrow are ugly and even that the land- 
scape is living and superb. As I think I have 
remarked before, the Republic is founded on 
the plough. 



88 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT- 
SEEING 

It would be really interesting to know exactly 
why an intelligent person — by which I mean a 
person with any sort of intelligence — can 
and does dislike sight-seeing. Why does 
the idea of a char-a-banc full of tourists 
going to see the birthplace of Nelson or 
the death-scene of Simon de Montfort strike 
a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite 
easily what this dim aversion to tourists 
and their antiquities does not arise from — 
at least, in my case. Whatever my other 
vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid 
cast), I can lay my hand on my heart 
and say that it does not arise from a paltry 
contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the 
still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If 
there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than 
irreverence for the past, it is irreverence for 
89 



SIGHT-SEEING 

the present, for the passionate and many-col- 
oured procession of life, which includes the 
char-a-banc among its many chariots and tri- 
umphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that 
contempt for vulgarity which sneers at the 
clerks on a Bank Holiday or the Cockneys on 
Margate sands. The man who notices nothing 
aibout the clerk except his Cockney accent 
would have noticed nothing about Simon de 
Montfort except his French accent. The man 
who jeers at Jones for having dropped an " h " 
might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped 
an arm. Scorn springs easily to the essentially 
vulgar-minded; and it is as easy to gibe at 
Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a crip- 
ple, as to gibe at the struggling speech and 
the maimed bodies of the mass of our comic 
and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from 
this affair of tourists and tombs, it is 
certainly not because I am so profane as 
to think lightly either of the tombs or the 
tourists. I reverence those great men who 
had the courage to die; I reverence also 
90 



SIGHT-SEEING 

these little men who have the courage to 
live. 

Even if this be conceded, another suggestion 
may be made. It may be said that antiquities 
and commonplace crowds are indeed good 
things, like violets and geraniums; but they do 
not go together. A billycock is a beautiful ob- 
ject (it may be eagerly urged), but it is not 
in the same style of architecture as Ely Cathe- 
dral; it is a dome, a small rococo dome in the 
Renaissance manner, and does not go with the 
pointed arches that assault heaven like spears. 
A char-a-banc is lovely (it may be said) if 
placed upon a pedestal and worshipped for its 
own sweet sake; but it does not harmonise with 
the curve and outline of the old three-decker 
on which Nelson died; its beauty is quite of 
another sort. Therefore (we will suppose our 
sage to argue) antiquity and democracy should 
be kept separate, as inconsistent things. 
Things may be inconsistent in time and space 
which are by no means inconsistent in essential 
value and idea. Thus the Catholic Church has 
91 



SIGHT-SEEING 

water for the new-bom and oil for the dying: 
but she never mixes oil and water. 

This explanation is plausible; but I do not 
find it adequate. The first objection is that the 
same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the 
case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to 
" beauty spots," even by persons of the most 
elegant position or the most protected privacy. 
Specially visiting the Coliseum b}^ moonlight 
always struck me as being as vulgar as visiting 
it by limelight. One millionaire standing on 
the top of Mont Blanc, one millionaire standing 
in the desert by the Sphinx, one millionaire 
standing in the middle of Stonehenge, is just 
as comic as one millionaire is anywhere else ; and 
that is saying a good deal. On the other hand, 
if the billycock had come privately and natur- 
ally into Ely Cathedral, no enthusiast for 
Gothic harmony would think of objecting to 
the billycock — so long, of course, as it was not 
worn on the head. But there is indeed a much 
deeper objection to this theory of the two in- 
compatible excellences of antiquity and pop- 



SIGHT-SEEING 

ularitj. For the truth is that it has been al- 
most entirely the antiquities that have normally 
interested the populace; and it has been almost 
entirely the populace who have systematically 
preserved the antiquities. The Oldest Inhab- 
itant has always been a clodhopper; I have 
never heard of his being a gentleman. It is 
the peasants who preserve all traditions of the 
sites of battles or the building of churches. It 
is they who remember, so far as any one remem- 
bers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver won- 
ders of saints. In the classes above them the 
supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. 
That is a true and tremendous text in Scrip- 
ture which says that " where there is no vision 
the people perish." But it is equally true in 
practice that where there is no people the 
visions perish. 

The idea must be abandoned, then, that this 
feeling of faint dislike towards popular sight- 
seeing is due to any inherent incompatibility 
between the idea of special shrines and trophies 
and the idea of large masses of ordinary men. 
93 



SIGHT-SEEING 

On the contrary, these two elements of sanctity 
and democracy have been specially connected 
and allied throughout history. The shrines 
and trophies were often put up by ordinary 
men. They were always put up for ordinary 
men. To whatever things the fastidious mod- 
ern artist may choose to apply his theory of 
specialist judgment, and an aristocracy of 
taste, he must necessarily find it difficult really 
to apply it to such historic and monumental art. 
Obviously, a public building is meant to im- 
press the public. The most aristocratic tomb 
is a democratic tomb, because it exists to be 
seen; the only aristocratic thing is the decay- 
ing corpse, not the undecaying marble; and if 
the man wanted to be thoroughly aristocratic, 
he should be buried in his own back-garden. 
The chapel of the most narrow and exclusive 
sect is universal outside, even if it is limited 
inside ; its walls and windows confront all points 
of the compass and all quarters of the cosmos. 
It may be small as a dwelling-place, but it is 
universal as a monument ; if its sectarians had 
94 



SIGHT-SEEING 

really wished to be private they should have 
met in a private house. Whenever and wher- 
ever we erect a national or municipal hall, 
pillar, or statue, we are speaking to the crowd 
like a demagogue. 

The statue of every statesman offers itself for 
election as much as the statesman himself. 
Every epitaph on a church slab is put up for 
the mob as much as a placard in a General 
Election. And if we follow this track of re- 
flection we shall, I think, really find why it is 
that modern sight-seeing jars on something in 
us, something that is not a caddish contempt 
for graves nor an equally caddish contempt for 
cads. For, after all, there is many a church- 
yard which consists mostly of dead cads ; but 
that does not make it less sacred or less 
sad. 

The real explanation, I fancy, is this: that 
these cathedrals and columns of triumph were 
meant, not for people more cultured and self- 
conscious than modern tourists, but for people 
much rougher and more casual. Those heaps 
95 



SIGHT-SEEING 

of live stone like frozen fountains, were so 
placed and poised as to catch the eye of 
ordinary inconsiderate men going about their 
daily business; and when they are so seen they 
are never forgotten. The true way of reviving 
the magic of our great minsters and historic 
sepulchres is not the one which Ruskin was al- 
ways recommending. It is not to be more care- 
ful of historic buildings. Nay, it is rather to 
be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in 
Maidstone to visit an aunt in Dover, and you 
will see Canterbury Cathedral as it was built 
to be seen. Go through London only as the 
shortest way between Croydon and Hampstead, 
and the Nelson Column will (for the first time 
in your life) remind you of Nelson. You will 
appreciate Hereford Cathedral if you have come 
for cider, not if you have come for architecture. 
You will really see the Place Vendome if you 
have come on business, not if you have come 
for art. For it was for the simple and labori- 
ous generations of men, practical, troubled 
about many things, that our fathers reared 
96 



SIGHT-SEEING 

those portents. There is, indeed, another ele- 
ment, not unimportant: the fact that people 
have gone to cathedrals to pray. But in dis- 
cussing modem artistic cathedral-lovers, we 
need not consider this. 



97 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

When men of science (or, more often, men who 
talk about science) speak of studying history 
or human society scientifically they always for- 
get that there are two quite distinct questions 
involved. It may be that certain facts of the 
body go with certain facts of the soul, but it by 
no means follows that a grasp of such facts 
of the body goes with a grasp of the things of 
the soul. A man may show very learnedly that 
certain mixtures of race make a happy com- 
munity, but he may be quite wrong (he gener- 
ally is) about what communities are happy. A 
man may explain scientifically how a certain 
physical type involves a really bad man, but he 
may be quite wrong (he generally is) about 
which sort of man is really bad. Thus his 
whole argument is useless, for he understands 
only one half of the equation. 

The drearier kind of don may come to me and 
98 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

say, " Celts are unsuccessful ; look at Irishmen, 
for instance." To which I should reply, " You 
may know all about Celts ; but it is obvious that 
you know nothing about Irishmen. The Irish 
are not in the least unsuccessful, unless it is un- 
successful to wander from their own country 
over a great part of the earth, in which case 
the English are unsuccessful too." A man with 
a bumpy head may say to me ( as a kind of New 
Year greeting) , " Fools have microcephalous 
skulls," or what not. To which I shall reply, 
" In order to be certain of that, you must be 
a good judge both of the physical and of the 
mental fact. It is not enough that you should 
know a microcephalous skull when you see it. 
It is also necessary that you should know a 
fool when you see him; and I have a suspicion 
that you do not know a fool when you see him, 
even after the most lifelong and intimate of all 
forms of acquaintanceship." 

The trouble with most sociologists, criminolo- 
gists, etc., is that while their knowledge of their 
own details is exhaustive and subtle, their knowl- 
99 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

edge of man and society, to which these are to 
be applied, is quite exceptionally superficial and 
silly. They know everything about biology, but 
almost nothing about life. Their ideas of his- 
tory, for instance, are simply cheap and un- 
educated. Thus some famous and foolish pro- 
fessor measured the skull of Charlotte Corday 
to ascertain the criminal type; he had not his- 
torical knowledge enough to know that if there 
is any " criminal type," certainly Charlotte 
Corday had not got it. The skull, I believe, 
afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Cor- 
day's at all; but that is another story. The 
point is that the poor old man was trying to 
match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull 
without knowing anything whatever about her 
mind. 

But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude 
and startling example. 

In a popular magazine there is one of the 

usual articles about criminology ; about whether 

wicked men could be made good if their heads 

were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest 

100 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

men I know of are much too rich and powerful 
ever to submit to the process, the speculation 
leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, how- 
ever, a curious absence of the portraits of living 
millionaires from such galleries of awful ex- 
amples; most of the portraits in which we are 
called upon to remark the line of the nose or 
the curve of the forehead appear to be the por- 
traits of ordinary sad men, who stole because 
they were hungry or killed because they were in 
a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary 
infinitely ; sometimes it is the remarkable square 
head, sometimes it is the unmistakable round 
head; sometimes the learned draw attention to 
the abnormal development, sometimes to the 
striking deficiency of the back of the head. I 
have tried to discover what is the invariable 
factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific 
criminal type; after exhaustive classification I 
have to come to the conclusion that it consists in 
being poor. 

But it was among the pictures in this article 
that I received the final shock; the enlighten- 
101 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

merit which has left me in lasting possession of 
the fact that criminologists are generally more 
ignorant than criminals. Among the starved 
and bitter, but quite human, faces was one head, 
neat but old-fashioned, with the powder of the 
18th century and a certain almost pert prim- 
ness in the dress which marked the conventions 
of the upper middle-class about 1790. The face 
was lean and lifted stiffly up, the eyes stared for- 
ward with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firm 
with a heroic firmness ; all the more pathetic be- 
cause of a certain delicacy and deficiency of 
male force. Without knowing who it was, one 
could have guessed that it was a man in the 
manner of Shakespeare's Brutus, a man of 
piercingly pure intentions, prone to use gov- 
ernment as a mere machine for morality, very 
sensitive to the charge of inconsistency and a 
little too proud of his own clean and honourable 
life. I say I should have known this almost 
from the face alone, even if I had not known 
who it was. 

But I did know who it was. It was 

loa 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

Robespierre. And underneath the portrait of 
this pale and too eager moralist were written 
these remarkable words : " Deficiency of ethical 
instincts," followed by something to the effect 
that he knew no mercy (which is certainly un- 
true), and by some nonsense about a retreat- 
ing forehead, a peculiarity which he shared with 
Louis XVI and with half the people of his time 
and ours. 

Then it was that I measured the staggering 
distance between the knowledge and the igno- 
rance of science. Then I knew that all crim- 
inology might be worse than worthless, because 
of its utter ignorance of that human material 
of which it is supposed to be speaking. The 
man who could say that Robespierre was defi- 
cient in ethical instincts is a man utterly to be 
disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He 
might as well say that John Bunyan was defi- 
cient in ethical instincts. You may say that 
Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and 
you may say the same of Bunyan. But if these 
two men were morbid and unbalanced they were 
103 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much 
about morality, not by feeling too little. You 
may say if you like that Robespierre was (in 
a negative sort of way) mad. But if he was 
mad he was mad on ethics. He and a com- 
pany of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually 
impatient of unreason and wrong, resolved that 
Europe should not be choked up in every chan- 
nel by oligarchies and state secrets that already 
stank. The work was the greatest that was 
ever given to men to do except that which Chris- 
tianity did in dragging Europe out of the abyss 
of barbarism after the Dark Ages. But they 
did it, and no one else could have done it. 

Certainly we could not do it. We are not 
ready to fight all Europe on a point of justice. 
We are not ready to fling our most powerful 
class as mere refuse to the foreigner ; we are not 
ready to shatter the great estates at a stroke; 
we are not ready to trust ourselves in an awful 
moment of utter dissolution in order to make 
all things seem intelligible and all men feel hon- 
ourable henceforth. We are not strong enough 

m 



A CRIMINAL HEAD 

to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong 
enough to be as weak as Robespierre. There 
is only one thing, it seems, that we can do. Like 
a mob of children, we can play games upon 
this ancient battlefield ; we can pull up the bones 
and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of that 
unimaginable war; and we can chatter to each 
other childishly and innocently about skulls that 
are imbecile and heads that are criminal. 

I do not know whose heads are criminal, but 
I think I know whose are imbecile. 



105 



THE WRATH OF THE ROSES 

The position of the rose among flowers is like 
that of the dog among animals. It is not so 
much that both are domesticated as that we 
have some dim feeling that they were always 
domesticated. There are wild roses and there 
are wild dogs. I do not know the wild dogs; 
the wild roses are very nice. But nobody ever 
thinks of either of them if the name is abruptly 
mentioned in a gossip or a poem. On the other 
hand, there are tame tigers and tame cobras, 
but if one says, " I have a cobra in my pocket," 
or " There is a tiger in the music-room," the 
adjective " tame " has to be somewhat hastily 
added. If one speaks of beasts one thinks first 
of wild beasts; if of flowers one thinks first of 
wild flowers. 

But there are two great exceptions caught so 
completely into the wheel of man's civilisation, 
entangled so unalterably with his ancient emo- 
106 



THE WRATH OF THE ROSES 

tions and images, that the artificial product 
seems more natural than the natural. The dog 
is not a part of natural history, but of human 
history; and the real rose grows in a gar- 
den. All must regard the elephant as some- 
thing tremendous, but tamed; and many, 
especially in our great cultured centres, re- 
gard every bull as presumably a mad bull. 
In the same way we think of most garden 
trees and plants as fierce creatures of the for- 
est or morass taught at last to endure the 
curb. 

But with the dog and the rose this instinctive 
principle is reversed. With them we think of the 
artificial as the archetype; the earth-bom as 
the erratic exception. We think vaguely of the 
wild dog as if he had run away, like the stray 
cat. And we cannot help fancying that the 
wonderful wild rose of our hedges has escaped 
by jumping over the hedge. Perhaps they fled 
together, the dog and the rose: a singular and 
(on the whole) an imprudent elopement. Per- 
haps the treacherous dog crept from the ken- 
107 



THE WRATH OF THE ROSES 

nel, and the rebellious rose from the flower-bed, 
and they fought their way out in company, one 
with teeth and the other with thorns. Possibly 
this is why my dog becomes a wild dog when he 
sees roses, and kicks them anywhere. Possibly 
this is why the wild rose is called a dog-rose. 
Possibly not. 

But there is this degree of dim barbaric truth 
in the quaint old-world legend that I have just 
invented. That in these two cases the civilised 
product is felt to be the fiercer, nay, even the 
wilder. Nobody seems to be afraid of a wild 
dog: he is classed among the jackals and the 
servile beasts. The terrible cave canem is writ- 
ten over man's creation. When we read " Be- 
ware of the Dog," it means beware of the tame 
dog: for it is the tame dog that is terrible. 
He is terrible in proportion as he is tame: it is 
his loyalty and his virtues that are awful to the 
stranger, even the stranger within your gates; 
still more to the stranger halfway over your 
gates. He is alarmed at such deafening and 
108 



THE WRATH OF THE ROSES 

furious docility ; he flees from that great monster 
of mildness. 

Well, I have much the same feeling when I 
look at the roses ranked red and thick and 
resolute round a garden ; they seem to me bold 
and even blustering. I hasten to say that I 
know even less about my own garden than about 
anybody else's garden. I know nothing about 
roses, not even their names. I know only the 
name Rose; and Rose is (in every sense of the 
word) a Christian name. It is Christian in 
the one absolute and primordial sense of Chris- 
tian — that it comes down from the age of 
pagans. The rose can be seen, and even smelt, 
in Greek, Latin, Proven9al, Gothic, Renascence, 
and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word 
Rose, which (like wine and other noble words) 
is the same in all the tongues of white men, I 
know literally nothing. I have heard the more 
evident and advertised names. I know there is 
a flower which calls itself the Glory of Dijon — 
which I had supposed to be its cathedral. In 
any case, to have produced a rose and a cathe- 
109 



THE WRATH OF THE ROSES 

dral is to have produced not only two very 
glorious and humane things, but also (as I main- 
tain) two very soldierly and defiant things. I 
also know there is a rose called Marechal Niel — 
note once more the military ring. 

And when I was walking round my garden the 
other day I spoke to my gardener (an enterprise 
of no little valour) and asked him the name of a 
strange dark rose that had somehow oddly taken 
my fancy. It was almost as if it reminded me 
of some turbid element in history and the soul. 
Its red was not only swarthy, but smoky ; there 
was something congested and wrathful about its 
colour. It was at once theatrical and sulky. 
The gardener told me it was called Victor 
Hugo. 

Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have 
some secret power about them ; even their names 
may mean something in connection with them- 
selves, in which they differ from nearly all the 
sons of men. But the rose itself is royal and 
dangerous ; long as it has remained in the rich 
110 



THE WRATH OF THE ROSES 

house of civilisation, it has never laid off its 
armour. A rose always looks like a mediaeval 
gentleman of Italy, with a cloak of crimson 
and a sword: for the thorn is the sword of the 
rose. 

And there is this real moral in the matter; 
that we have to remember that civilisation as 
it goes on ought not perhaps to grow more 
fighting — but ought to grow more ready to 
fight. The more valuable and reposeful is the 
order we have to guard, the more vivid should 
be our ultimate sense of vigilance and potential 
violence. And when I walk round a summer 
garden, I can understand how those high mad 
lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before 
their swords clashed, caught at roses for their in- 
stinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For 
to me any such garden is full of the wars of the 
roses. 



Ill 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

One silver morning I walked into a small grey 
town of stone, like twenty other grey western 
towns, which happened to be called Glaston- 
bury; and saw the magic thorn of near two 
thousand years growing in the open air as 
casually as any bush in my garden. 

In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane 
things, the myth is more important than the 
history. One cannot say anything stronger of 
the strange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn 
than that it dwarfs St. Dunstan. Standing 
among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks 
of the first century and not of the tenth; one's 
mind goes back beyond the Saxons and beyond 
the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The 
tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain 
is presumably a mere legend. But it is not by 
any means so incredible or preposterous a legend 
as many modem people suppose. The popular 
112 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

notion is that the thing is quite comic and incon- 
ceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went 
to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered 
the North Pole. We think of Palestine, as lit- 
tle, localised and very private, of Christ's fol- 
lowers as poor folk, astricti glebis, rooted to 
their towns or trades; and we think of vast 
routes of travel and constant world-communica- 
tions as things of recent and scientific origin. 
But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it is. 
It is part of that large and placid lie that the 
rationalists tell when they say that Christianity 
arose in ignorance and barbarism. Christianity 
arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling 
cosmopolitan civilisation. Long sea-voyages 
were not so quick, but were quite as incessant 
as to-day; and though in the nature of things 
Christ had not many rich followers, it is not 
unnatural to suppose that He had some. And 
a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a 
Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit 
Britain. The same fallacy is employed with the 
same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel 
113 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

of St. John; which critics say could not have 
been written by one of the first few Christians 
because of its Greek transcendentalism and its 
Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology, 
but every human being is a divinely appointed 
judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone 
seems to me to prove nothing at all. Palestine 
was not a secluded valley of barbarians ; it was 
an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun 
with all sorts of people of all kinds of educa- 
tion. To take a rough parallel: suppose some 
great prophet arose among the Boers in South 
Africa. The prophet himself might be a simple 
or unlettered man. But no one who knows the 
modern world would be surprised if one of his 
closest followers were a Professor from Heidel- 
berg or an M.A. from Oxford. 

All this is not urged here with any notion of 
proving that the tale of the thorn is not a myth. 
As I have said, it probably is a myth. It is 
urged with the much more important object of 
pointing out the proper attitude towards such 
myths. The proper attitude is one of doubt 
114 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

and hope and of a kind of light mystery. The 
tale is certainly not impossible ; as it is certainly 
not certain. And through all the ages since the 
Roman Empire men have fed their healthy 
fancies and their historical imagination upon the 
very twilight condition of such tales. But to- 
day real agnosticism has declined along with 
real theology. People cannot leave a creed alone ; 
though it is the essence of a creed to be clear. 
But neither can they leave a legend alone; 
though it is the essence of a legend to be vague. 
That sane half scepticism which was found in 
all rustics, in all ghost tales and fairy tales, 
seems to be a lost secret. Modem people must 
make scientifically certain that St. Joseph did 
or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact 
that it is now quite impossible to find out; and 
that it does not, in a religious sense, very much 
matter. But it is essential to feel that he may 
have gone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and 
dedications branching and blossoming like the 
thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt. 
Taken thus, not heavily like a problem but 
115 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

lightly like an old tale, the thing does lead one 
along the road of very strange realities, and the 
thorn is found growing in the heart of a very 
secret maze of the soul. Something is really 
present in the place; some closer contact with 
the thing which covers Europe but is still a 
secret. Somehow the grey town and the green 
bush touch across the world the strange small 
country of the garden and the grave; there is 
verily some communion between the thorn tree 
and the crown of thorns. 

A man never knows what tiny thing will startle 
him to such ancestral and impersonal tears. 
Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a 
common panorama ; and on this grey and silver 
morning the ruined towers of the cathedral stood 
about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds. 
But down in a hollow where the local antiquaries 
are making a fruitful excavation, a magnificent 
old ruffian with a pickaxe (whom I believe to 
have been St. Joseph of Arimathea) showed me 
a fragment of the old vaulted roof which he had 
found in the earth; and on the whitish grey 
H6 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

stone there was just a faint brush of gold. 
There seemed a piercing and swordHke pathos, 
an unexpected fragrance of all forgotten or 
desecrated things, in the bare survival of that 
poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock. 
To the strong shapes of the Roman and the 
Gothic I had grown accustomed ; but that weak 
touch of colour was at once tawdry and tender, 
like some popular keepsake. Then I knew that 
all my fathers were men like me ; for the columns 
and arches were grave, and told of the gravity 
of the builders ; but here was one touch of their 
gaiety. I almost expected it to fade from the 
stone as I stared. It was as if men had been 
able to preserve a fragment of a sunset. 

And then I remembered how the artistic critics 
have always praised the grave tints and the grim 
shadows of the crumbling cloisters and abbey 
towers, and how they themselves often dress up 
like Gothic ruins in the sombre tones of dim grey 
walls or dark green ivy. I remembered how 
they hated almost all primary things, but espe- 
cially primary colours. I knew they were ap- 

117 



THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY 

preciating much more delicately and truly than 
I the sublime skeleton and the mighty fungoids 
of the dead Glastonbury. But I stood for an 
instant alive in the living Glastonbury, gay with 
gold and coloured like the toy-book of a child. 



118 



THE FUTURISTS 

It was a warm golden evening, fit for October, 
and I was watching (with regret) a lot of little 
black pigs being turned out of my garden, when 
the postman handed to me, with a perfunctory 
haste which doubtless masked his emotion, the 
Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what 
Futurism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futu- 
rists themselves seem a little doubtful; perhaps 
they are waiting for the future to find out. But 
if you ask me what its Declaration is, I answer 
eagerly ; for I can tell you quite a lot about that. 
It is written by an Italian named Marinetti, 
in a magazine which is called Poesia. It is 
headed " Declaration of Futurism " in enormous 
letters ; it is divided off with little numbers ; and 
it starts straight away like this: " 1. We intend 
to glorify the love of danger, the custom of 
energy, the strengt of daring. 2. The es- 
sential elements of our poetry will be courage, 
119 



THE FUTURISTS 

audacity, and revolt. 3. Literature having up 
to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, 
and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive 
movement, the feverish insomnia, running, the 
perilous leap, the cuff and the blow." While 
I am quite willing to exalt the cuff within rea- 
son, it scarcely seems such an entirely new sub- 
ject for literature as the Futurists imagine. It 
seems to me that even through the slumber which 
fills the Siege of Troy, the Song of Roland, and 
the Orlando Furioso, and in spite of the thought- 
ful immobility which marks " Pantagruel," 
" Henry V," and the Ballad of Chevy Chase, 
there are occasional gleams of an admiration 
for courage, a readiness to glorify the love of 
danger, and even the " strengt of daring," I 
seem to remember, slightly differentl}^ spelt, 
somewhere in literature. 

The distinction, however, seems to be that the 

warriors of the past went in for tournaments, 

which were at least dangerous for themselves, 

while the Futurists go in for motor-cars, which 

120 



THE FUTURISTS 

are mainly alarming for other people. It is the 
Futurist in his motor who does the " aggressive 
movement," but it is the pedestrians who go in 
for the " running " and the " perilous leap." 
Section No. 4 says, " We declare that the splen- 
dour of the world has been enriched with a new 
form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race- 
automobile adorned with great pipes like 
serpents with explosive breath. ... A race- 
automobile which seems to rush over exploding 
powder is more beautiful than the Victory of 
Samothrace." It is also much easier, if you 
have the money. It is quite clear, however, that 
you cannot be a Futurist at all unless you 
are frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid 
and soul-stirring sentence : " 5. We will sing the 
praises of man holding the flywheel of which the 
ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled 
itself around the circuit of its own orbit." What 
a jolly song it would be — so hearty, and with 
such a simple swing in it ! I can imagine the 
Futurists round the fire in a tavern trolling out 
in chorus some ballad with that incomparable 

in 



THE FUTURISTS 

refrain ; shouting over their swaying flagons 
some such words as these: 

A notion came into my head as new as it was bright 
That poems might be written on the subject of a fight ; 
No praise was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Nap or Corbett, 
But we will sing the praises of man holding the flj^wheel of 

which the ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled 

itself around the circuit of its own orbit. 

Then lest it should be supposed that Futurism 
would be so weak as to permit any democratic 
restraints upon the violence and levity of the 
luxurious classes, there would be a special verse 
in honour of the motors also : 

My fathers scaled the mountains in their pilgrimages far, 

But I feel full of energy while sitting in a car ; 

And petrol is the perfect wine, I lick it and absorb it, 

So we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of 

which the ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled 

itself around the circuit of its own orbit. 

Yes, it would be a rollicking catch. I wish 
there were space to finish the song, or to detail 
all the other sections in the Declaration. Suf- 
fice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dis- 
122 



THE FUTURISTS 

like both of Liberal politics and Christian 
morals; I saj gratifying because, however un- 
fortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have 
quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble 
hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. 
They will " glorify war — the only true hygiene 
of the world — militarism, patriotism, the de- 
structive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful 
ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman." They 
will " destroy museums, libraries, and fight 
against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian 
cowardice." The proclamation ends with an 
extraordinary passage which I cannot under- 
stand at all, all about something that is going 
to happen to Mr. Marinetti when he is forty. 
As far as I can make out he will then be killed 
by other poets, who will be overwhelmed with 
love and admiration for him. " They will come 
against us from far away, from everywhere, leap- 
ing on the cadence of their first poems, clawing 
the air with crooked fingers and scenting at the 
Academy gates the good smell of our decaying 
minds." Well, it is satisfactory to be told, 
123 



THE FUTURISTS 

however obscurely, that this sort of thing is 
coming to an end some day, to be replaced by 
some other tomfoolery. And though I com- 
monly refrain from clawing the air with crooked 
fingers, I can assure Mr. Marinetti that this 
omission does not disqualify me, and that I scent 
the good smell of his decaying mind all right. 

I think the only other point of Futurism is 
contained in this sentence : " It is in Italy that 
we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory De- 
claration, with which to-day we found Futurism, 
for we will free Italy from her numberless muse- 
ums which cover her with countless cemeteries." 
I think that rather sums it up. The best way, 
one would think, of freeing oneself from a mu- 
seum would be not to go there. Mr. Marinetti's 
fathers and grandfathers freed Italy from pris- 
ons and torture chambers, places where people 
were held by force. They, being in the 
bondage of " moralism," attacked Governments 
as unjust, real Governments, with real guns. 
Such was their utilitarian cowardice that they 
would die in hundreds upon the bayonets of 
124. 



THE FUTURISTS 

Austria. I can well imagine why Mr. Marinetti 
in his motor-car does not wish to look back at 
the past. If there was one thing that could 
make him look smaller even than before it is 
that roll of dead men's drums and that dream 
of Garibaldi going by. The old Radical 
ghosts go by, more real than the living men, to 
assault I know not what ramparted city in hell. 
And meanwhile the Futurist stands outside a 
museum in a warlike attitude, and defiantly tells 
the official at the turnstile that he will never, 
never come in. 

There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not 
so much that they rush in where angels fear to 
tread, but rather that they let out what devils 
intend to do. Some perversion of folly will 
float about nameless and pervade a whole soci- 
ety ; then some lunatic gives it a name, and hence- 
forth it is harmless. With all really evil things, 
when the danger has appeared the danger is 
over. Now it may be hoped that the self- 
indulgent sprawlers of Poesia have put a name 
once and for all to their philosophy. In the 
125 



THE FUTURISTS 

case of their philosophy, to put a name to it is 
to put an end to it. Yet their philosophy has 
been very widespread in our time; it could 
hardly have been pointed and finished except by 
this perfect folly. The creed of which (please 
God) this is the flower and finish consists 
ultimately in this statement: that it is bold and 
spirited to appeal to the future. Now, it is 
entirely weak and half-witted to appeal to the 
future. A brave man ought to ask for what 
he wants, not for what he expects to get. A 
brave man who wants Atheism in the future 
calls himself an Atheist ; a brave man who wants 
Socialism, a Socialist; a brave man who wants 
Catholicism, a Catholic. But a weak-minded 
man who does not know what he wants in the 
future calls himself a Futurist. 

They have driven all the pigs away. Oh 
that they had driven away the prigs, and left 
the pigs ! The sky begins to droop with dark- 
ness and all birds and blossoms to descend un- 
faltering into the healthy underworld where 
126 



THE FUTURISTS 

things slumber and grow. There was just one 
true phrase of Mr. Marinetti's about himself: 
" the feverish insomnia." The whole universe 
is pouring headlong to the happiness of the 
night. It is only the madman who has not the 
courage to sleep. 



127 



DUKES 

The Due de Chambertin-Pommard was a small 
but lively relic of a really aristocratic family, 
the members of which were nearly all Atheists 
up to the time of the French Revolution, but 
since that event (beneficial in such various ways) 
had been very devout. He was a Royalist, a 
Nationalist, and a perfectly sincere patriot in 
that particular style which consists of cease- 
lessly asserting that one's country is not so 
much in danger as alread3^ destroyed. He 
wrote cheery little articles for the Royalist Press 
entitled " The End of France " or " The Last 
Cry," or what not, and he gave the final touches 
to a picture of the Kaiser riding across a pave- 
ment of prostrate Parisians with a glow of 
patriotic exultation. He was quite poor, and 
even his relations had no money. He walked 
briskly to all his meals at a little open cafe, and 
he looked just like everybody else. 
1^8 



DUKES 

Living in a country where aristocracy does 
not exist, he had a high opinion of it. He 
would yearn for the swords and the stately 
manners of the Pommards before the Revolu- 
tion — most of whom had been (in theory) Re- 
publicans. But he turned with a more prac- 
tical eagerness to the one country in Europe 
where the tricolour has never flown and men 
have never been roughly equalised before the 
State. The beacon and comfort of his life was 
England, which all Europe sees clearly as the 
one pure aristocracy that remains. He had, 
moreover, a mild taste for sport and kept an 
English bulldog, and he believed the English 
to be a race of bulldogs, of heroic squires, and 
hearty yeomen vassals, because he read all this 
in English Conservative papers, written by ex- 
hausted little Levantine clerks. But his read- 
ing was naturally for the most part in the 
French Conservative papers (though he knew 
English well), and it was in these that he first 
heard of the horrible Budget. There he read 
of the confiscatory revolution planned by the 
129 



DUKES 

Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, the sinister 
Georges Lloyd. He also read how chivalrously 
Prince Arthur Balfour of Burleigh had defied 
that demagogue, assisted by Austen the Lord 
Chamberlain and the gay and witty Walter 
Lang. And being a brisk partisan and a 
capable journalist, he decided to pay England 
a special visit and report to his paper upon the 
struggle. 

He drove for an eternity in an open fly 
through beautiful woods, with a letter of in- 
troduction in his pocket to one duke, who was 
to introduce him to another duke. The end- 
less and numberless avenues of bewildering pine 
woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driv- 
ing through the countless corridors of a dream. 
Yet the vast silence and freshness healed his ir- 
ritation at modem ugliness and unrest. It 
seemed a background fit for the return of chiv- 
alry. In such a forest a king and all his court 
might lose themselves hunting or a knight errant 
might perish with no companion but God. The 
castle itself when he reached it was somewhat 
130 



DUKES 

smaller than he had expected, but he was de- 
lighted with its romantic and castellated outline. 
He was just about to alight when someljody 
opened two enormous gates at the side and the 
vehicle drove briskly through. 

" That is not the house ? " he inquired politely 
of the driver. 

" No, sir," said the driver, controlling the 
corners of his mouth. " The lodge, sir." 

" Indeed," said the Due de Chambertin- 
Pommard, " that is where the Duke's land 
begins ? " 

" Oh no, sir," said the man, quite in dis- 
tress. " We've been in his Grace's land all 
day." 

The Frenchman thanked him and leant back 
in the carriage, feeling as if everything were in- 
credibly huge and vast, like Gulliver in the coun- 
try of the Brobdingnags. 

He got out in front of a long fa9ade of a 

somewhat severe building, and a little careless 

man in a shooting- jacket and knickerbockers ran 

down the steps. He had a weak, fair moustache 

131 



DUKES 

and dull, blue, babyish eyes; his features were 
insignificant, but his manner extremely pleasant 
and hospitable. This was the Duke of Ayles- 
bury, perhaps the largest landowner in Europe, 
and known only as a horsebreeder until he be- 
gan to write abrupt little letters about the 
Budget. He led the French Duke upstairs, 
talking trivialities in a hearty way, and there 
presented him to another and more important 
English oligarch, who got up from a writing- 
desk with a slightly senile jerk. He had a 
gleaming bald head and glasses ; the lower part 
of his face was masked with a short, dark beard, 
which did not conceal a beaming smile, not un- 
mixed with sharpness. He stooped a little as 
he ran, like some sedentary head clerk or cashier ; 
and even without the cheque-book and papers on 
his desk would have given the impression of a 
merchant or man of business. He was dressed 
in a light grey check jacket. He was the Duke 
of Windsor, the great Unionist statesman. Be- 
tween these two loose, amiable men, the little 
Gaul stood erect in his black frock coat, with 
13g 



DUKES 

the monstrous gravity of French ceremonial 
good manners. This stiffness led the Duke of 
Windsor to put him at his ease (like a tenant), 
and he said, rubbing his hands : 

" I was delighted with your letter . . . de- 
lighted. I shall be very pleased if I can give 
you — er — any details." 

" My visit," said the Frenchman, " scarcely 
suffices for the scientific exhaustion of detail. 
I seek only the idea. The idea, that is always 
the immediate thing." 

" Quite so," said the other rapidly ; " quite so 
. . . the idea." 

Feeling somehow that it was his turn (the 
English Duke having done all that could be 
required of him) Pommard had to say : " I mean 
the idea of aristocracy. I regard this as the 
last great battle for the idea. Aristocracy, like 
any other thing, must justify itself to mankind. 
Aristocracy is good because it preserves a pic- 
ture of human dignity in a world where that 
dignity is often obscured by servile necessities. 
Aristocracy alone can keep a certain high reti- 
133 



DUKES 

cence of soul and body, a certain noble distance 
between the sexes." 

The Duke of Aylesbury, who had a clouded 
recollection of having squirted soda-water 
down the neck of a Countess on the previous 
evening, looked somewhat gloomy, as if lament- 
ing the theoretic spirit of the Latin race. The 
elder Duke laughed heartily, and said : " Well, 
well, you know; we English are horribly prac- 
tical. With us the great question is the land. 
Out here in the country ... do you know this 
part? " 

" Yes, yes," cried the Frenchman eagerly. 
" I see what you mean. The country ! the old 
rustic life of humanity! A holy war upon the 
bloated and filthy towns. What right have 
these anarchists to attack your busy and pros- 
perous countrysides? Have they not thriven 
under your management? Are not the English 
villages always growing larger and gayer un- 
der the enthusiastic leadership of their encour- 
aging squires? Have you not the Maypole? 
Have you not Merry England ? " 
134 



DUKES 

The Duke of Aylesbury made a noise in his 
throat, and then said very indistinctly : " They 
all go to London." 

"All go to London?" repeated Pommard, 
with a blank stare. " Why.? " 

This time nobody answered, and Pommard 
had to attack again. 

" The spirit of aristocracy is essentially op- 
posed to the greed of the industrial cities. Yet 
in France there are actually one or two nobles 
so vile as to drive coal and gas trades, and drive 
them hard." 

The Duke of Windsor looked at the carpet. 

The Duke of Aylesbury went and looked out 
of the window. At length the latter said: 
" That's rather stiff, you know. One has to 
look after one's own business in town as well." 

" Do not say it," cried the little Frenchman, 
starting up. "I tell you all Europe is one fight 
between business and honour. If we do not 
fight for honour, who will.^^ What other right 
have we poor two-legged sinners to titles and 
quartered shields except that we staggeringly 
135 



DUKES 

support some idea of giving things which can- 
not be demanded and avoiding things which can- 
not be punished? Our only claim is to be a 
wall across Christendom against the Jew pedlars 
and pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins and 
the " 

The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his 
hands in his pockets. 

" Oh, I say," he said, " you've been readin' 
Lloyd George. Nobody but dirty Radicals can 
say a word against Goldstein." 

" I certainly cannot permit," said the elder 
Duke, rising rather shakily, " the respected 
name of Lord Goldstein " 

He intended to be impressive, but there was 
something in the Frenchman's eye that is not so 
easily impressed; there shone there that steel 
which is the mind of France. 

" Gentlemen," he said, " I think I have all 
the details now. You have ruled England for 
four hundred years. By your own account you 
have not made the countryside endurable to men. 
By your own account you have helped the vic- 



DUKES 

tory of vulgarity and smoke. And by your 
own account you are hand and glove with those 
very money-grubbers and adventurers whom 
gentlemen have no other business but to keep 
at bay. I do not know what your people will 
do ; but my people would kill you." 

Some seconds afterwards he had left the 
Duke's house, and some hours afterwards the 
Duke's estate. 



137 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

I SUPPOSE that, taking this summer as a whole, 
people will not call it an appropriate time for 
praising the English climate. But for mj part 
I will praise the English climate till I die — even 
if I die of the English climate. There is no 
weather so good as English weather. Nay, in 
a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere 
but in England. * In France you have much sun 
and some rain ; in Italy you have hot winds and 
cold winds ; in Scotland and Ireland you have 
rain, either thick or thin ; in America you have 
hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you 
have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But 
all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, 
and you settle down into contentment or despair. 
Only in our own romantic country do you have 
the strictly romantic thing called Weather; 
beautiful and changing as a woman. The great 
English landscape painters (neglected now like 
138 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

everything that is English) have this salient dis- 
tinction: that the Weather is not the atmos- 
phere of their pictures; it is the subject of their 
pictures. They paint portraits of the Weather. 
The Weather sat to Constable. The Weather 
posed for Turner ; and a deuce of a pose it was. 
This cannot truly be said of the greatest of 
their continental models or rivals. Poussin and 
Claude painted objects, ancient cities or perfect 
Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium of 
the climate. But in the English painters 
Weather is the hero; with Turner an Adelphi 
hero, taunting, flashing and fighting, melo- 
dramatic but really magnificent. The English 
climate, a tall and terrible protagonist, robed 
in rain and thunder and snow and sunlight, 
fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. 
I admit the superiority of many other French 
things besides French art. But I will not 
yield an inch on the superiority of English 
weather and weather-painting. Why, the 
French have not even got a word for Weather: 
and you must ask for the weather in French 
139 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

as if you were asking for the time in Eng- 
lish. 

Then, again, variety of climate should always 
go with stability of abode. The weather in the 
desert is monotonous ; and as a natural conse- 
quence the Arabs wander about, hoping it may 
be different somewhere. But an Englishman's 
house is not only his castle ; it is his fairy castle. 
Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve 
are perpetually touching and turning it from 
clay to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a 
line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden 
which is literally different on every one of the 
three hundred and sixty-five days. Sometimes 
it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far 
as a faint and fiery evening cloud. The same 
principle (by the way) applies to the difficult 
problem of wives. Variability is one of the vir- 
tues of a woman. It avoids the crude require- 
ment of polygamy. So long as you have one 
good wife you are sure to have a spiritual 
harem. 

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in 
140 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a 
" colourless " day. Grey is a colour, and can 
be a very powerful and pleasing colour. There 
is also an insulting style of speech about " one 
grey day just like another." You might as 
well talk about one green tree just like another. 
A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between 
us and the sun ; so is a green tree, if it comes to 
that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as 
the green in their style and shape, in their tint 
and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and 
another grey like dove's plumage. One may 
seem grey like the deathly frost, and another 
grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. No 
things could seem further apart than the doubt 
of grey and the decision of scarlet. Yet grey 
and red can mingle, as they do in the morning 
clouds : and also in a sort of warm smoky stone 
of which they build the little towns in the west 
country. In those towns even the houses that 
are wholly grey have a glow in them as if their 
secret firesides were such furnaces of hospitality 
as faintly to transfuse the walls like walls of 
141 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

cloud. And wandering in those westland parts 
I did once really find a sign-post pointing up a 
steep crooked path to a town that was called 
Clouds. I did not climb up to it; I feared that 
either the town would not be good enough for 
the name, or I should not be good enough for the 
town. Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm 
grey stone have a geniality which is not achieved 
by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs ; as if it 
were better to warm one's hands at the ashes of 
Glastonbury than at the painted flames of 
Croydon. 

Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, dar- 
ing and evil-minded men) are fond of bringing 
forward the argument that colours sufPer in 
grey weather, and that strong sunlight is neces- 
sary to all the hues of heaven and earth. Here 
again there are two words to be said; and it is 
essential to distinguish. It is true that sun is 
needed to burnish and bring into bloom the ter- 
tiary and dubious colours ; the colour of peat, 
pea-soup. Impressionist sketches, brown velvet 
coats, olives, grey and blue slates, the com- 
142 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

plexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic 
rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old 
boots ; the delicate shades of these do need the 
sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often 
clings to them. But if you have a healthy negro 
taste in colour, if you choke your garden with 
poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house 
sky-blue and scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a 
golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat, you 
will not only be visible on the greyest day, but 
you will notice that your costume and environ- 
ment produce a certain singular effect. You 
will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look 
more luminous on a grey day, because they are 
seen against a sombre background and seem to 
be burning with a lustre of their own. Against 
a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There 
is something strange about them, at once vivid 
and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phan- 
tasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky 
is necessarily the high light of the picture ; and 
its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. 
But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen 
143 



THE GLORY OF GREY 

heaven; the red daisies are really the red lost 
eyes of day ; and the sunflower is the vice-regent 
of the sun. 

Lastly, there is this value about the colour 
that men call colourless ; that it suggests in some 
way the mixed and troubled average of existence, 
especially in its quality of strife and expectation 
and promise. Grey is a colour that always 
seems on the eve of changing to some other 
colour; of brightening into blue or blanching 
into white or bursting into green and gold. So 
we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite 
hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is 
grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our 
heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the 
morning. 



144 



THE ANARCHIST 

I HAVE now lived for about two months in the 
country, and have gathered the last rich 
autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong 
desire to see London. Artists living in my 
neighbourhood talk rapturously of the rolling 
liberty of the landscape, the living peace of 
woods. But I say to them (with a slight Buck- 
inghamshire accent), " Ah, that is how Cockneys 
feel. For us real old country people the coun- 
try is reality; it is the town that is romance. 
Nature is as plain as one of her pigs, as com- 
monplace, as comic, and as healthy. But civ- 
ilisation is full of poetry, even if it be some- 
times an evil poetry. The streets of London are 
paved with gold ; that is, with the very poetry of 
avarice." With these typically bucolic words I 
touch my hat and go ambling away on a stick, 
with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest In- 
habitant ; while in my more animated moments I 
145 



THE ANARCHIST 

am taken for the Village Idiot. Exchanging 
heavy but courteous salutations with other gaf- 
fers, I reach the station, where I ask for a ticket 
for London where the king lives. Such a jour- 
ney, mingled of provincial fascination and fear, 
did I successfully perform only a few days ago ; 
and alone and helpless in the capital, found 
myself in the tangle of roads around the Marble 
Arch. 

A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I 
have slightly exaggerated my rusticity and re- 
moteness. And yet it is true as I came to that 
corner of the Park that, for some unreasonable 
reason of mood, I saw all London as a strange 
city and civilisation itself as one enormous whim. 
The Marble Arch itself, in its new insular posi- 
tion, with traffic turning dizzily all about it, 
struck me as a placid monstrosity. What could 
be wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, 
with people going everywhere except under it.^ 
If I took down my front door and stood it up 
all by itself in the middle of my back garden, 
my village neighbours (in their simplicity) 
146 



THE ANARCHIST 

would probably stare. Yet the Marble Arch is 
now precisely that ; an elaborate entrance and 
the only place by which no one can enter. By 
the new arrangement its last weak pretence to 
be a gate has been taken away. The cabman 
still cannot drive through it, but he can have 
the delights of riding round it, and even (on 
foggy nights) the rapture of running into it* 
It has been raised from the rank of a fiction to 
the dignity of an obstacle. 

As I began to walk across a comer of the 
Park, this sense of what is strange in cities be- 
gan to mingle with some sense of what is stern 
as well as strange. It was one of those queer- 
coloured winter days when a watery sky changes 
to pink and grey and green, like an enormous 
opal. The trees stood up grey and angular, as 
if in attitudes of agony ; and here and there on 
benches under the trees sat men as grey and 
angular as they. It was cold even for me, who 
had eaten a large breakfast and purposed to 
eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch ; it was colder 
for the men under the trees. And to eastward 
147 



THE ANARCHIST 

through the opalescent haze, the warmer whites 
and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone 
as unsubstantially as if the clouds themselves 
had taken on the shape of mansions to mock 
the men who sat there in the cold. But the 
mansions were real — like the mockery. 

No one worth calling a man allows his moods 
to change his convictions; but it is by moods 
that we understand other men's convictions. 
The bigot is not he who knows he is right ; every 
sane man knows he is right. The bigot is he 
whose emotions and imagination are too cold 
and weak to feel how it is that other men go 
wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men 
might go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one 
of those huddled men under the trees had stood 
up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have 
been erroneous — ^but not irrelevant. It would 
have been appropriate and in the picture; that 
lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and 
impotence on the other. It may be true (on the 
whole it is) that this social machine we have 
made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a ma- 
148 



THE ANARCHIST 

chine ; and we have made it. It does hold those 
poor men helpless ; and it does lift those rich 
men high . . . and such men — good Lord ! By 
the time I flung myself on a bench beside an- 
other man I was half inclined to try anarchy 
for a change. 

The other was of more prosperous appear- 
ance than most of the men on such seats; still, 
he was not what one calls a gentleman, and had 
probably worked at some time like a human be- 
ing. He was a small, sharp-faced man, with 
grave, staring eyes, and a beard somewhat for- 
eign. His clothes were black; respectable and 
yet casual; those of a man who dressed conven- 
tionally because it was a bore to dress uncon- 
ventionally — as it is. Attracted by this and 
other things, and wanting an outburst for my 
bitter social feelings, I tempted him into speech, 
first about the cold, and then about the General 
Election. To this the respectable man replied: 

" Well, I don't belong to any party myself. 
I'm an Anarchist." 

I looked up and almost expected fire from 
149 



THE ANARCHIST 

heaven. This coincidence was like the end of 
the world. I had sat down feeling that some- 
how or other Park-lane must be pulled down; 
and I had sat down beside the man who wanted 
to pull it down. I bowed in silence for an in- 
stant under the approaching apocalypse; and 
in that instant the man turned sharply and 
started talking like a torrent. 

" Understand me," he said. " Ordinary peo- 
ple think an Anarchist means a man with a 
bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an 
Anarchist. But for that fatal admission of his 
on page 793, he would be a complete Anarchist. 
Otherwise, he agrees wholly with Pidge." 

This was uttered with such blinding rapidity 
of syllabification as to be a better test of teeto- 
talism than the Scotch one of saying " Biblical 
criticism " six times. I attempted to speak, 
but he began again with the same rippling 
rapidity. 

" You will say that Pidge also admits govern- 
ment in that tenth chapter so easily misunder- 
stood. Bolger has attacked Pidge on those 
150 



THE ANARCHIST 

lines. But Bolger has no scientific training. 
Bolger is a psychometrist, but no sociologist. 
To any one who has combined a study of Pidge 
with the earlier and better discoveries of Kruxy, 
the fallacy is quite clear. Bolger confounds 
social coercion with coercional social action." 

His rapid rattling mouth shut quite tight 
suddenly, and he looked steadily and triumph- 
antly at me, with his head on one side. I opened 
my mouth, and the mere motion seemed to sting 
him to fresh verbal leaps. 

" Yes," he said, " that's all very well. The 
Finland Group has accepted Bolger. But," he 
said, suddenly lifting a long finger as if to stop 
me, " but — Pidge has replied. His pamphlet 
is published. He has proved that Potential So- 
cial Rebuke is not a weapon of the true An- 
archist. He has shown that just as religious 
authority and political authority have gone, so 
must emotional authority and psychological 
authority. He has shown " 

I stood up in a sort of daze. " I think you 
remarked," I said feebly, " that the mere com- 
151 



THE ANARCHIST 

mon populace do not quite understand An- 
archism " 

" Quite so," he said with burning swiftness ; 
" as I said, they think any Anarchist is a man 
with a bomb, whereas " 

" But great heavens, man ! " I said ; " it's the 
man with the bomb that I understand! I wish 
you had half his sense. What do I care how 
many German dons tie themselves in knots about 
how this society began? My only interest is 
about how soon it will end. Do you see those 
fat white houses over in Park-lane, where your 
masters live ? " 

He assented and muttered something about 
concentrations of capital. 

" Well," I said, " if the time ever comes when 
we all storm those houses, will you tell me one 
thing? Tell me how we shall do it without 
authority? Tell me how you will have an army 
of revolt without discipline? " 

For the first instant he was doubtful; and I 
had bidden him farewell, and crossed the street 
agaiuj when I saw him open his mouth and begin 
152 



THE ANARCHIST 

to run after me. He had remembered something 
out of Pidge. 

I escaped, however, and as I leapt on an om- 
nibus I saw again the enormous emblem of the 
Marble Arch. I saw that massive symbol of 
the modern mind: a door with no house to it; 
the gigantic gate of Nowhere. 



153 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

Readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other mod- 
em writers may be interested to know that the 
Superman has been found. I found him; he 
lives in South Croydon. My success will be a 
great blow to Mr. Shaw, who has been following 
quite a false scent, and is now looking for the 
creature in Blackpool; and as for Mr. Wells's 
notion of generating him out of gases in a pri- 
vate laboratory, I always thought it doomed to 
failure. I assure Mr. Wells that the Superman 
at Croydon was born in the ordinary way, 
though he himself, of course, is anything but 
ordinary. 

Nor are his parents unworthy of the wonder- 
ful being whom they have given to the world. 
The name of Lady Hypatia Smythe-Browne 
(now Lady Hypatia Hagg) will never be for- 
gotten in the East End, where she did such 
splendid social work. Her constant cry of 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

'' Save the children ! " referred to the cruel neg- 
lect of children's eyesight involved in allowing 
them to play with crudely painted toys. She 
quoted unanswerable statistics to prove that 
children allowed to look at violet and vermilion 
often suffered from failing eyesight in their 
extreme old age ; and it was owing to her cease- 
less crusade that the pestilence of the Monkey- 
on-the-Stick was almost swept from Hoxton. 
The devoted worker would tramp the streets un- 
tiringly, taking away the toys from all the poor 
children, who were often moved to tears by her 
kindness. Her good work was interrupted, 
partly by a new interest in the creed of Zoro- 
aster, and partly by a savage blow from an um- 
brella. It was inflicted by a dissolute Irish 
apple-woman, who, on returning from some orgy 
to her ill-kept apartment, found Lady Hypatia 
in the bedroom taking down an oleograph, 
which, to say the least of it, could not really 
elevate the mind. At this the ignorant and 
partly intoxicated Celt dealt the social reformer 
a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation 
155 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

of theft. The lady's exquisitely balanced mind 
received a shock, and it was during a short men- 
tal illness that she married Dr. Hagg. 

Of Dr. Hagg himself I hope there is no need 
to speak. Any one even slightly acquainted 
with those daring experiments in Neo-Individu- 
alist Eugenics, which are now the one absorbing 
interest of the English democracy, must know 
his name and often commend it to the personal 
protection of an impersonal power. Early in 
life he brought to bear that ruthless insight 
into the history of religions which he had gained 
in boyhood as an electrical engineer. Later he 
became one of our greatest geologists ; and 
achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the 
future Socialism which only geology can give. 
At first there seemed something like a rift, a 
faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views 
and those of his aristocratic wife. For she was 
in favour (to use her own powerful epigram) 
of protecting the poor against themselves; 
while he declared pitilessly, in a new and strik- 
ing metaphor, that the weakest must go to the 
156 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

wall. Eventually, however, the married pair 
perceived an essential union in the unmistakably 
modem character of both their views; and in 
this enlightening and intelligible formula their 
souls found peace. The result is that this union 
of the two highest types of our civilisation, the 
fashionable lady and the all but vulgar medical 
man, has been blessed by the birth of the Super- 
man, that being whom all the labourers in Bat- 
tersea are so eagerly expecting night and day. 

I found the house of Dr. and Lady Hypatia 
Hagg without much difficulty ; it is situated in 
one of the last straggling streets of Croydon, 
and overlooked by a line of poplars. I reached 
the door towards the twilight, and it was natural 
that I should fancifully see something dark and 
monstrous in the dim bulk of that house which 
contained the creature who was more marvellous 
than the children of men. When I entered the 
house I was received with exquisite courtesy by 
Lady Hypatia and her husband; but I found 
much greater difficulty in actually seeing the Su- 
157 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

perman, who is now about fifteen years old, and 
is kept by himself in a quiet room. Even my 
conversation with the father and mother did 
not quite clear up the character of this mysteri- 
ous being. Lady Hypatia, who has a pale and 
poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable 
and pathetic greys and greens with which she 
has brightened so many homes in Hoxton, did 
not appear to talk of her offspring with any of 
the vulgar vanity of an ordinary human mother. 
I took a bold step and asked if the Superman 
was nice looking. 

'' He creates his own standard, you see," she 
replied, with a slight sigh. " Upon that plane 
he is more than Apollo. Seen from our lower 
plane, of course " And she sighed again. 

I had a horrible impulse, and said suddenly, 
" Has he got any hair.? " 

There was a long and painful silence, and 
then Dr. Hagg said smoothly : " Everything 
upon that plane is different ; what he has got is 
not . . . well, not, of course, what we call hair 

. . . but " 

158 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

" Don't you think," said his wife, very softly, 
" don't you think that really, for the sake of 
argument, when talking to the mere public, one 
might call it hair? " 

" Perhaps you are right," said the doctor 
after a few moments' reflection. " In connection 
with hair like that one must speak in parables." 

" Well, what on earth is it," I asked in some 
irritation, " if it isn't hair? Is it feathers? " 

" Not feathers, as we understand feathers," 
answered Hagg in an awful voice. 

I got up in some irritation. " Can I see him, 
at any rate? " I asked. " I am a journalist, 
and have no earthly motives except curiosity 
and personal vanity. I should like to say that 
I had shaken hands with the Superman." 

The husband and wife had both got heavily to 
their feet, and stood, embarrassed. 

" Well, of course, you know," said Lady Hy- 
patia, with the really charming smile of the aris- 
tocratic hos4:ess. " You know he can't exactly 
shake hands . . . not hands, you know. . . • 

The structure, of course " 

159 



HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN 

I broke out of all social bounds, and rushed 
at the door of the room which I thought to con- 
tain the incredible creature. I burst it open; 
the room was pitch dark. But from in front 
of me came a small sad yelp, and from behind 
me a double shriek. 

" You have done it, now ! " cried Dr. Hagg, 
burying his bald brow in his hands. " You have 
let in a draught on him and he is dead." 

As I walked away from Croydon that night I 
saw men in black carrying out a coffin that was 
not of any human shape. The wind wailed 
above me, whirling the poplars, so that they 
drooped and nodded like the plumes of some 
cosmic funeral. " It is, indeed," said Dr. Hagg, 
" the whole universe weeping over the frustra- 
tion of its most magnificent birth." But I 
thought that there was a hoot of laughter in 
the high wail of the wind. 



160 



THE NEW HOUSE 

Within a stone's throw of my house they are 
building another house. I am glad they are 
building it, and I am glad it is within a stone's 
throw; quite well within it, with a good cata- 
pult. Nevertheless, I have not yet cast the first 
stone at the new house — not being, strictly 
speaking, guiltless myself in the matter of new 
houses. And, indeed, in such cases there is a 
strong protest to be made. The whole curse of 
the last century has been what is called the 
Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that 
Man must go alternately from one extreme to 
the other. It is a shameful and even shocking 
fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of 
mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. 
It is only when he is dead that he swings. But 
whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one 
often does) progressing towards a madhouse, 
one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just 
161 



THE NEW HOUSE 

had a splendid escape from another madhouse. 
Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not 
because they have tried Socialism and found it 
nice, but because they have tried Individualism 
and found it particularly nasty. Thus, many 
embrace Christian Science solely because they 
are quite sick of heathen science; they are so 
tired of believing that everything is matter that 
they will even take refuge in the revolting fable 
that everything is mind. Man ought to march 
somewhere. But modern man (in his sick re- 
action) is ready to march nowhere — so long as 
it is the Other End of Nowhere. 

The case of building houses is a strong in- 
stance of this. Early in the nineteenth century 
our civilisation chose to abandon the Greek and 
mediaeval idea of a town, with walls, limited and 
defined, with a temple for faith and a market- 
place for politics; and it chose to let the city 
grow like a jungle with blind cruelty and bestial 
unconsciousness ; so that London and Liverpool 
are the great cities we now see. Well, people 
have reacted against that ; they have grown tired 
162 



THE NEW HOUSE 

of living in a city which is as dark and barbaric 
as a forest, only not as beautiful, and there has 
been an exodus into the country of those who 
could afford it, and some I could name who 
can't. Now, as soon as this quite rational re- 
coil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite ex- 
treme. People went about with beaming faces, 
boasting that they were twenty-three miles from 
a station. Rubbing their hands, they exclaimed 
in rollicking asides that their butcher only called 
once a month, and that their baker started out 
with fresh hot loaves which were quite stale be- 
fore they reached the table. A man would 
praise his little house in a quiet valley, but 
gloomily admit (with a slight shake of the 
head) that a human habitation on the distant 
horizon was faintly discernible on a clear day. 
Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had 
the most completely inconvenient postal service ; 
and there w^ere many jealous heartburnings if 
one friend found out any uncomfortable situa- 
tion which the other friend had thoughtlessly 
overlooked. 

163 



THE NEW HOUSE 

In the feverish summer of this fanaticism 
there arose the phrase that this or that part of 
England is being " built over." Now, there is 
not the slightest objection, in itself, to Eng- 
land being built over by men, any more than 
there is to its being (as it is already) built over 
by birds, or by squirrels, or by spiders. But if 
birds' nests were so thick on a tree that one 
could see nothing but nests and no leaves at all, 
I should say that bird civilisation was becoming 
a bit decadent. If whenever I tried to walk 
down the road I found the whole thoroughfare 
one crawling carpet of spiders, closely inter- 
locked, I should feel a distress verging on dis- 
taste. If one were at every turn crowded, el- 
bowed, overlooked, overcharged, sweated, rack- 
rented, swindled, and sold up by avaricious and 
arrogant squirrels, one might at last remon- 
strate. But the great towns have grown intol- 
erable solely because of such suffocating vulgar- 
ities and tyrannies. It is not humanity that 
disgusts us in the huge cities; it is inhumanity. 
It is not that there are human beings ; but that 
164 



THE NEW HOUSE 

they are not treated as such. We do not, I 
hope, dislike men and women; we only dislike 
their being made into a sort of jam: crushed to- 
gether so that they are not merely powerless 
but shapeless. It is not the presence of people 
that makes London appalling. It Is merely the 
absence of The People. 

Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my 
part of England is being built over, so long 
as it is being built over in a human way at 
human intervals and in a human proportion. 
So long, in short, as I am not myself built over, 
like a pagan slave buried in the foundations of a 
temple, or an American clerk in a star-striking 
pagoda of flats, I am delighted to see the faces 
and the homes of a race of bipeds, to which I am 
not only attracted by a strange affection, but to 
which also (by a touching coincidence) I actu- 
ally happen to belong. I am not one desiring 
deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my 
town were Athens I would stay in it. I am not 
Simeon Stylites ; except in the mournful sense 
that every Saturday I find myself on the top 
165 



THE NEW HOUSE 

of a newspaper column. I am not in the desert 
repenting of some monstrous sins ; at least, I am 
repenting of them all right, but not in the 
desert. I do not want the nearest human house 
to be too distant to see; that is my objection 
to the wilderness. But neither do I want the 
nearest human house to be too close to see ; that 
is my objection to the modem city. I love my 
fellow-man ; I do not want him so far oiF that I 
can only observe anything of him through a 
telescope, nor do I want him so close that I can 
examine parts of him with a microscope. I 
want him within a stone's throw of me ; so that 
whenever it is really necessary, I may throw the 
stone. 

Perhaps, after all, it may not be a stone. 
Perhaps, after all, it may be a bouquet, or a 
snowball, or a firework, or a Free Trade Loaf; 
perhaps they will ask for a stone and I shall 
give them bread. But it is essential that they 
should be within reach : how can I love my neigh- 
bour as myself if he gets out of range for snow- 
balls.'' There should be no institution out of 
166 



THE NEW HOUSE 

the reach of an indignant or admiring human- 
ity. I could hit the nearest house quite well 
with the catapult ; but the truth is that the cata- 
pult belongs to a little boy I know, and, with 
characteristic youthful selfishness, he has taken 
it away. 



167 



THE WINGS OF STONE 

The preceding essay is about a half-built house 
upon my private horizon ; I wrote it sitting in a 
garden-chair; and as, though it was a week 
ago, I have scarcely moved since then (to speak 
of), I do not see why I should not go on writing 
about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved; I 
have even walked across a field — a field of turf 
all fiery in our early summer sunlight — and 
studied the early angular red skeleton which has 
turned golden in the sun. It is odd that the 
skeleton of a house is cheerful when the skeleton 
of a man is mournful, since we only see it after 
the man is destroyed. At least, we think the 
skeleton is mournful; the skeleton himself does 
not seem to think so. Anyhow, there is some- 
thing strangely primary and poetic about this 
sight of the scaffolding and main lines of a 
human building; it is a pity there is no scaf- 
folding round a human baby. One seems to 
168 



THE WINGS OF STONE 

see domestic life as the daring and ambitious 
thing that it is, when one looks at those open 
staircases and empty chambers, those spirals of 
wind and open halls of sky. Ibsen said that the 
art of domestic drama was merely to knock one 
wall out of the four walls of a drawing-room. I 
find the drawing-room even more impressive 
when all four walls are knocked out. 

I have never understood what people mean by 
domesticity being tame; it seems to me one of 
the wildest of adventures. But if you wish to 
see how high and harsh and fantastic an ad- 
venture it is, consider only the actual structure 
of a house itself. A man may march up in a 
rather bored way to bed; but at least he is 
mounting to a height from which he could kill 
himself. Every rich, silent, padded staircase, 
with banisters of oak, stair-rods of brass, and 
busts and settees on every landing, every such 
staircase is truly only an awful and naked lad- 
der running up into the Infinite to a deadly 
height. The millionaire who stumps up inside 
the house is really doing the same thing as the 

169 



THE WINGS OF STONE 

tiler or roof-mender who climbs up outside the 
house ; they are both mounting up into the void. 
They are both making an escalade of the intense 
inane. Each is a sort of domestic mountaineer ; 
he is reaching a point from which mere idle fall- 
ing will kill a man ; and life is always worth liv- 
ing while men feel that they may die. 

I cannot understand people at present mak- 
ing such a fuss about flying ships and aviation, 
when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyra- 
mids have done something so much more wild 
than flying. A grasshopper can go astonish- 
ingly high up in the air ; his biological limitation 
and weakness is that he cannot stop there. 
Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous insects 
can pass through the sky, but they cannot pass 
any communication between it and the earth. 
But the army of man has advanced vertically 
into infinity, and not been cut off^. It can estab- 
lish outposts in the ether, and yet keep open 
behind it its erect and insolent road. It would 
be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon- 
ball at the moon; but would it not be grander 
170 



THE WINGS OF STONE 

to build a railway to the moon? Yet every 
building of brick or wood is a hint of that high 
railroad ; every chimney points to some star, and 
every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising 
on these awful and unbroken wings of stone 
seems to me more majestic and more mystic than 
man fluttering for an instant on wings of can- 
vas and sticks of steel. How sublime and, in- 
deed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled 
ladders on which we all live, like climbing mon- 
keys ! Many a black-coated clerk in a flat may 
comfort himself for his sombre garb by reflecting 
that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial 
elm. Many a wealthy bachelor on the top floor 
of a pile of mansions should look forth at morn- 
ing and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle 
whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful 
cliffy. How sad that the word " giddy " is used 
to imply wantonness or levity! It should be a 
high compliment to a man's exalted spiritual- 
ity and the imagination to say he is a little 
giddy. 

I strolled slowly back across the stretch of 
171 



THE WINGS OF STONE 

turf by the sunset, a field of the cloth of gold. 
As I drew near my own house, its huge size began 
to horrify me; and when I came to the porch 
of it I discovered with an incredulity as strong 
as despair that my house was actually bigger 
than myself. A minute or two before there 
might well have seemed to be a monstrous and 
mythical competition about which of the two 
should swallow the other. But I was Jonah; 
my house was the huge and hungry fish; and 
even as its jaws darkened and closed about me I 
had again this dreadful fancy touching the dizzy 
altitude of all the works of man. I climbed the 
stairs stubbornly, planting each foot with sav- 
age care, as if ascending a glacier. When I got 
to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved 
my hat. The very word " landing " has about 
it the wild sound of some one washed up by the 
sea. I climbed each flight like a ladder in naked 
sky. The walls all round me failed and faded 
into infinity; I went up the ladder to my bed- 
room as Montrose went up the ladder to the 
gallows; sic itur ad astra. Do you think this 
172 



THE WINGS OF STONE 

is a little fantastic — even a little fearful and 
nervous ? Believe me, it is only one of the wild 
and wonderful things that one can learn by 
stopping at home. 



173 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of peo- 
ple in this world. The first kind of people are 
People; they are the largest and probably the 
most valuable class. We owe to this class the 
chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the 
houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to 
think of it), we probably belong to this class 
ourselves. The second class may be called for 
convenience the Poets ; they are often a nuisance 
to their families, but, generally speaking, a 
blessing to mankind. The third class is that of 
the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes de- 
scribed as the thoughtful people; and these are 
a blight and a desolation both to their families 
and also to mankind. Of course, the classifica- 
tion sometimes overlaps, like all classification. 
Some good people are almost poets and some 
bad poets are almost professors. But the divi- 
sion follows lines of real psychological cleav- 
174 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

age. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the 
fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest 
reflection and research. 

The class called People (to which you and I, 
with no little pride, attach ourselves) has certain 
casual, yet profound, assumptions, which are 
called " commonplaces," as that children are 
charming, or that twilight is sad and senti- 
mental, or that one man fighting three is a fine 
sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they 
are not even simple. The charm of children is 
very subtle; it is even complex, to the extent of 
being almost contradictory. It is, at its very 
plainest, mingled of a regard for hilarity and a 
regard for helplessness. The sentiment of twi- 
light, in the vulgarest drawing-room song or the 
coarsest pair of sweethearts, is, so far as it goes, 
a subtle sentiment. It is strangely balanced be- 
tween pain and pleasure ; it might also be called 
pleasure tempting pain. The plunge of impa- 
tient chivalry by which we all admire a man 
fighting odds is not at all easy to define sep- 
arately; it means many things, pity, dramatic 
175 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in ex- 
periment and the indeterminate. The ideas of 
the mob are really very subtle ideas; but the 
mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it 
does not express them at all, except on those oc- 
casions (now only too rare) when it indulges 
in insurrection and massacre. 

Now, this accounts for the otherwise unrea- 
sonable fact of the existence of Poets. Poets 
are those who share these popular sentiments, 
but can so express them that they prove them- 
selves the strange and delicate things that they 
really are. Poets draw out the shy refinement 
of the rabble. Where the common man covers 
the queerest emotions by saying, " Rum little 
kid," Victor Hugo will write " L'art d'etre 
grandpere " ; where the stockbroker will only 
say abruptly, " Evenings closing in now," Mr. 
Yeats will write " Into the twilight " ; where the 
navvy can only mutter something about pluck 
and being " precious game," Homer will show 
you the hero in rags in his own hall defying the 
princes at their banquet. The Poets carry the 
176 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

popular sentiments to a keener and more 
splendid pitch ; but let it always be remembered 
that it is the popular sentiments that they are 
carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry 
to show that childhood was shocking, or that 
twilight was gay and farcical, or that a man 
was contemptible because he had crossed his 
single sword with three. The people who main- 
tain this are the Professors, or Prigs. 

The Poets are those who rise above the peo- 
ple by understanding them. Of course, most 
of the Poets wrote in prose — Rabelais, for in- 
stance, and Dickens. The Prigs rise above the 
people by refusing to understand them : by say- 
ing that all their dim, strange preferences are 
prejudices and superstitions. The Prigs make 
the people feel stupid ; the Poets make the people 
feel wiser than they could have imagined that 
they were. There are many weird elements in 
this situation. The oddest of all perhaps is the 
fate of the two factors in practical politics. 
The Poets who embrace and admire the people 
177 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

are often pelted with stones and crucified. The 
Prigs who despise the people are often loaded 
with lands and crowned. In the House of Com- 
mons, for instance, there are quite a number of 
prigs, but comparatively few poets. There are 
no People there at all. 

By poets, as I have said, I do not mean peo- 
ple who write poetry, or indeed people who 
write anything. I mean such people as, having 
culture and imagination, use them to understand 
and share the feelings of their fellows ; as against 
those who use them to rise to what they call a 
higher plane. Crudely, the poet differs from 
the mob by his sensibility ; the professor differs 
from the mob by his insensibility. He has not 
sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathise 
with the mob. His only notion is coarsely to 
contradict it, to cut across it, in accordance with 
some egotistical plan of his own ; to tell himself 
that, whatever the ignorant say, they are prob- 
ably wrong. He forgets that ignorance often 
has the exquisite intuitions of innocence. 



178 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

Let me take one example which may mark out 
the outline of the contention. Open the nearest 
comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly upon 
a joke about a mother-in-law. Now, the joke, 
as presented for the populace, will probably be 
a simple joke ; the old lady will be tall and stout, 
the hen-pecked husband will be small and cower- 
ing. But for all that, a mother-in-law is not a 
simple idea. She is a very subtle idea. The 
problem is not that she is big and arrogant; 
she is frequently little and quite extraordinarily 
nice. The problem of the mother-in-law is that 
she is like the twilight: half one thing and half 
another. Now, this twilight truth, this fine and 
even tender embarrassment, might be rendered, 
as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet 
would have to be some very penetrating and sin- 
cere novelist, like George Meredith, or Mr. H. 
G. Wells, w^hose " Ann Veronica " I have just 
been reading with delight. I would trust the 
fine poets and novelists because they follow the 
fairy clue given them in Comic Cuts. But sup- 
pose the Professor appears, and suppose he says 
179 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

(as he almost certainly will), "A mother-in- 
law is merely a fellow-citizen. Considerations 
of sex should not interfere with comradeship. 
Regard for age should not influence the in- 
tellect. A mother-in-law is merely Another 
Mind. We should free ourselves from these 
tribal hierarchies and degrees." Now, when 
the Professor says this (as he always does), I 
say to him, " Sir, you are coarser than Comic 
Cuts. You are more vulgar and blundering 
than the most elephantine music-hall artiste. 
You are blinder and grosser than the mob. 
These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got 
hold of a social shade and real mental distinc- 
tion, though they can only express it clumsily. 
You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of 
it at all. If you really cannot see that the 
bridegroom's mother and the bride have any rea- 
son for constraint or diffidence, then you are 
neither polite nor humane; you have no 
sympathy in you for the deep and doubtful 
hearts of human folk." It is better even to 
put the difficulty as the vulgar put it than 
180 



THE THREE KINDS OF MEN 

to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty alto- 
gether. 

The same question might be considered well 
enough in the old proverb that two is company 
and three is none. This proverb is the truth 
put popularly: that is, it is the truth put 
wrong. Certainly it is untrue that three is no 
company. Three is splendid company : three is 
the ideal number for pure comradeship : as in the 
Three Musketeers. But if you reject the 
proverb altogether; if you say that two and 
three are the same sort of company ; if you can- 
not see that there is a wider abyss between two 
and three than between three and three million 
— then I regret to inform you that you belong 
to the Third Class of human beings; that you 
shall have no company cither of two or three, but 
shall be alone in a howling desert till you die. 



181 



THE STEWARD OF THE CHIL- 
TERN HUNDREDS 

The other day on a stray spur of the Chiltem 
Hills I climbed up upon one of those high, 
abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead 
seem to look down upon all the living. It was a 
mountain of ghosts as Olympus was a mountain 
of gods. In that church lay the bones of great 
Puritan lords, of a time when most of the power 
of England was Puritan, even of the Established 
Church. And below these uplifted bones lay 
the huge and hollow valleys of the English coun- 
tryside, where the motors went by every now 
and then like meteors, where stood out in white 
squares and oblongs in the chequered forest 
many of the country seats even of those same 
families now dulled with wealth or decayed with 
Toryism. And looking over that deep green 
prospect on that luminous yellow evening, a 
lovely and austere thought came into my mind, 
182 



THE STEWARD OF CHILTERN 

a thought as beautiful as the green wood and as 
grave as the tombs. The thought was this : 
that I should like to go into Parliament, quarrel 
with my party, accept the Stewardship of the 
Chiltern Hundreds, and then refuse to give it 
up. 

We are so proud in England of our crazy con- 
stitutional anomalies that I fancy that very few 
readers indeed will need to be told about the 
Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. But in case 
there should be here or there one happy man 
who has never heard of such twisted tomfool- 
eries, I will rapidly remind you what this legal 
fiction is. As it is quite a voluntary, sometimes 
even an eager, affair to get into Parliament, 
you would naturally suppose that it would be 
also a voluntary matter to get out again. You 
would think your fellow-members would be in- 
different, or even relieved to see you go; espe- 
cially as (by another exercise of the shrewd, il- 
logical old English common sense) they have 
carefully built the room too small for the people 
who have to sit in it. But not so, my pippins, 
183 



THE STEWARD OF CHILTERN 

as it says in the " Iliad." If you are merely a 
member of Parliament (Lord knows why) you 
can't resign. But if you are a Minister of the 
Crown (Lord knows why) you can. It is neces- 
sary to get into the Ministry in order to get 
out of the House; and they have to give you 
some office that doesn't exist or that nobody else 
wants and thus unlock the door. So you go to 
the Prime Minister, concealing your air of 
fatigue, and say, " It has been the ambition of 
my life to be Steward of the Chiltern Hun- 
dreds." The Prime Minister then replies, " I 
can imagine no man more fitted both morally 
and mentally for that high office." He then 
gives it you, and you hurriedly leave, reflecting 
how the republics of the Continent reel anarchic- 
ally to and fro for lack of a little solid English 
directness and simplicity. 

Now, the thought that struck me like a thun- 
derbolt as I sat on the Chiltern slope was that I 
would like to get the Prime Minister to give me 
the Chiltern Hundreds, and then startle and 
184 



THE STEWARD OF CHILTERN 

disturb him by showing the utmost interest in 
my work. I should profess a general knowledge 
of my duties, but wish to be instructed in the de- 
tails. I should ask to see the Under-Steward 
and the Under-Under-Steward, and all the fine 
staff of experienced permanent officials who are 
the glory of this department. And, indeed, my 
enthusiasm would not be wholly unreal. For as 
far as I can recollect the original duties of a 
Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds were to put 
down the outlaws and brigands in that part of 
the world. Well, there are a great many out- 
laws and brigands in that part of the world 
still, and though their methods have so largely 
altered as to require a corresponding alteration 
in the tactics of the Steward, I do not see why 
an energetic and public-spirited Steward should 
not nab them yet. 

For the robbers have not vanished from the 
old high forests to the west of the great city. 
The thieves have not vanished ; they have grown 
so large that they are invisible. You do not see 
the word " Asia " written across a map of that 
185 



THE STEWARD OF CHILTERN 

neighbourhood; nor do you see the word 
" Thief " written across the countrysides of 
England; though it is really written in equally 
large letters. I know men governing despot- 
ically great stretches of that country, whose 
every step in life has been such that a slip would 
have sent them to Dartmoor ; but they trod 
along the high hard wall between right and 
wrong, the wall as sharp as a sword-edge, as 
softly and craftily and lightly as a cat. The 
vastness of their silent violence itself obscured 
what they were at ; if they seem to stand for the 
rights of property it is really because they have 
so often invaded them. And if they do not 
break the laws, it is only because they make 
them. 

But after all we only need a Steward of the 
Chiltern Hundreds who really understands cats 
and thieves. Men hunt one animal differently 
from another ; and the rich could catch swindlers 
as dexterously as they catch otters or antlered 
deer if they were really at all keen upon doing 
186 



THE STEWARD OF CHILTERN 

it. But then thej never have an uncle with 
antlers ; nor a personal friend who is an otter. 
When some of the great lords that lie in the 
churchyard behind me went out against their foes 
in those deep woods beneath I wager that they 
had bows against the bows of the outlaw^s, and 
spears against the spears of the robber knights. 
They knew what they were about; they fought 
the evildoers of their age with the weapons of 
their age. If the same common sense were ap- 
plied to commercial law, in forty-eight hours it 
would be all over with the American Trusts and 
the African forward finance. But it will not 
be done: for the governing class either does not 
care, or cares very much, for the criminals; 
and as for me, I had a delusive opportunity of 
being Constable of Beaconsfield (with grossly 
inadequate powers), but I fear I shall never 
really be Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. 



187 



THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

In my daily paper this morning I read the fol- 
lowing interesting paragraphs, which take my 
mind back to an England which I do not remem- 
ber and which, therefore (perhaps), I admire. 

" Nearly sixty years ago — on 4 September, 
1850 — the Austrian General Haynau, who had 
gained an unenviable fame throughout the world 
by his ferocious methods in suppressing the 
Hungarian revolution in 1849, while on a visit 
to this country, was belaboured in the streets of 
London by the draymen of Messrs. Barclay, 
Perkins and Co., whose brewery he had just in- 
spected in company of an adjutant. Popular 
delight was so great that the Government of the 
time did not dare to prosecute the assailants, 
and the General- — the ' women-flogger,' as he was 
called by the people — ^had to leave these shores 
without remedy. 

188 



THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

" He returned to his own country and settled 
upon his estate at Szekeres, which is close to the 
commune above-mentioned. By his will the 
estate passed to his daughter, after whose death 
it was to be presented to the commune. This 
daughter has just died, but the Communal Coun- 
cil, after much deliberation, has declined to ac- 
cept the gift, and ordered that the estate should 
be left to fall out of cultivation, and be called 
the ' Bloody Meadow.' " 

Now that is an example of how things happen 
under an honest democratical impulse. I do not 
dwell specially on the earlier part of the story, 
though the earlier part of the story is astonish- 
ingly interesting. It recalls the days when 
Englishmen were potential fighters ; that is, po- 
tential rebels. It is not for lack of agonies of 
intellectual anger : the Sultan and the late King 
Leopold have been denounced as heartily as 
General Haynau. But I doubt if they would 
have been physically thrashed in the London 
streets. 

189 



THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

It is not the tyrants that are lacking^ but the 
draymen. Nevertheless, it is not upon the his- 
toric heroes of Barclay, Perkins and Co., that 
I build all my hope. Fine as it was, it was not 
a full and perfect revolution. A brewer's dray- 
man beating an eminent European General with 
a stick, though a singularly bright and pleas- 
ing vision, is not a complete one. Only when 
the brewer's drayman beats the brewer with a 
stick shall we see the clear and radiant sunrise 
of British self-government. The fun will really 
start when we begin to thump the oppressors of 
England as well as the oppressors of Hungary. 
It is, however, a definite decline in the spiritual 
character of draymen that now they can thump 
neither one nor the other. 

But, as I have already suggested, my real 
quarrel is not about the first part of the extract, 
but about the second. Whether or no the dray- 
men of Barclay and Perkins have degenerated, 
the Commune which includes Szekeres has not 
degenerated. By the way, the Commune which 
190 



THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

includes Szekeres is called Kissekeres; I trust 
that this frank avowal will excuse me from the 
necessity of mentioning either of these places 
again by name. The Commune is still capable 
of performing direct democratic actions, if 
necessary, with a stick. 

I say with a stick, not with sticks, for that is 
the whole argument about democracy. A peo- 
ple is a soul ; and if you want to know what a 
soul is, I can only answer that it is something 
that can sin and that can sacrifice itself. A peo- 
ple can commit theft ; a people can confess theft ; 
a people can repent of theft. That is the idea 
of the republic. Now, most modern people 
have got into their heads the idea that democ- 
racies are dull, drifting things, a mere black 
swarm or slide of clerks to their accustomed 
doom. In most modern novels and essays it is 
insisted (by way of contrast) that a walking 
gentleman may have adventures as he walks. 
It is insisted that an aristocrat can commit 
crimes, because an aristocrat always cultivates 
liberty. But, in truth, a people can have ad- 
191 



THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

ventures, as Israel did crawling through the 
desert to the promised land. A people can do 
heroic deeds ; a people can commit crimes ; the 
French people did both in the Revolution ; the 
Irish people have done both in their much purer 
and more honourable progress. 

But the real answer to this aristocratic argu- 
ment which seeks to identify democracy with a 
drab utilitarianism may be found in action such 
as that of the Hungarian Commune — whose 
name I decline to repeat. This Commune did 
just one of those acts that prove that a sep- 
arate people has a separate personality ; it threw 
something away. A man can throw a banknote 
into the fire. A man can fling a sack of com 
into the river. The banknote may be burnt as 
a satisfaction of some scruple ; the corn may be 
destroyed as a sacrifice to some god. But 
whenever there is sacrifice we know there is a 
single will. Men may be disputatious and 
doubtful, may divide by very narrow majorities 
in their debate about how to gain wealth. But 
men have to be uncommonly unanimous in order 
192 



THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

to refuse wealth. It wants a very complete 
committee to bum a banknote in the office grate. 
It needs a highly religious tribe really to throw 
corn into the river. This self-denial is the 
test and definition of self-government. 

I wish I could feel certain that any English 
County Council or Parish Council would be 
single enough to make that strong gesture of a 
romantic refusal; could say, "no rents shall be 
raised from this spot; no grain shall grow in 
this spot; no good shall come of this spot; it 
shall remain sterile for a sign." But I am 
afraid they might answer, like the eminent 
sociologist in the story, that it was " wiste of 
spice." 



193 



THE STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

It is an English misfortune that what is called 
" public spirit " is so often a very private spirit ; 
the legitimate but strictly individual ideals of 
this or that person who happens to have the 
power to carry them out. When these private 
principles are held by very rich people, the re- 
sult is often the blackest and most repulsive 
kind of despotism, which is benevolent despotism. 
Obviously it is the public which ought to have 
public spirit. But in this country and at this 
epoch this is exactly what it has not got. We 
shall have a public washhouse and a public 
kitchen long before we have a public spirit; in 
fact, if we had a public spirit we might very 
probably do without the other things. But if 
England were properly and naturally governed 
by the English, one of the first results would 
probably be this : that our standard of excess 
or defect in property would be changed from 
194 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

that of the plutocrat to that of the moderately 
needy man. That is, that while property might 
be strictly respected, everything that is neces- 
sary to a clerk would be felt and considered on 
quite a different plane from anything which is 
a very great luxury to a clerk. This sane dis- 
tinction of sentiment is not instinctive at pres- 
ent, because our standard of life is that of the 
governing class, which is eternally turning lux- 
uries into necessities as fast as pork is turned 
into sausages; and which cannot remember the 
beginning of its needs and cannot get to the end 
of its novelties. 

Take, for the sake of argument, the case of 
the motor. Doubtless the duke now feels it as 
necessary to have a motor as to have a roof ; and 
in a little while he may feel it equally necessary 
to have a flying ship. But this does not prove 
(as the reactionary sceptics always argue) that 
a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It 
only proves that a man can get used to an arti- 
ficial life: it does not prove that there is no 
natural life for him to get used to. In the 
195 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

broad bird's-eye view of common sense there 
abides a huge disproportion between the need 
for a roof and the need for an aeroplane; and 
no rush of inventions can ever alter it. The 
only difference is that things are now judged 
by the abnormal needs, when they might be 
judged merely by the normal needs. The 
best aristocrat sees the situation from an 
aeroplane. The good citizen, in his loftiest 
moments, goes no further than seeing it from 
the roof. 

It is not true that luxury is merely relative. 
It is not true that it is only an expensive nov- 
elty which we may afterwards come to think a 
necessity. Luxury has a firm philosophical 
meaning; and where there is a real public spirit 
luxury is generally allowed for, sometimes re- 
buked, but always recognised instantly. To 
the healthy soul there is something in the very 
nature of certain pleasures which warns us that 
they are exceptions, and that if they be- 
come rules they will become very tyrannical 
rules. 

196 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

Take a harassed seamstress out of the Harrow 
Road and give her one lightning hour in a 
motor-car, and she will probably feel it as 
splendid, but strange, rare, and even terrible. 
But this is not (as the relativists say) merely 
because she has never been in a car before. She 
has never been in the middle of a Somerset cow- 
slip meadow before ; but if you put her there she 
does not think it terrifying or extraordinary, 
but merely pleasant and free and a little lonely. 
She does not think the motor monstrous because 
it is new. She thinks it monstrous because she 
has eyes in her head; she thinks it monstrous 
because it is monstrous. That is, her mothers 
and grandmothers, and the whole race by whose 
life she lives, have had, as a matter of fact, a 
roughly recognisable mode of living: sitting in 
a green field was a part of it ; travelling as quick 
as a cannon ball was not. And we should not 
look down on the seamstress because she mechan- 
ically emits a short sharp scream whenever the 
motor begins to move. On the contrary, we 
ought to look up to the seamstress, and regard 

197 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

her cry as a kind of mystic omen or revelation 
of nature, as the old Goths used to consider the 
howls emitted by chance females when annoyed. 
For that ritual yell is really a mark of moral 
health — of swift response to the stimulations 
and changes of life. The seamstress is wiser 
than all the learned ladies, precisely because she 
can still feel that a motor is a different sort of 
thing from a meadow. By the accident of her 
economic imprisonment it is even possible that 
she may have seen more of the former than the 
latter. But this has not shaken her cyclopean 
sagacity as to which is the natural thing and 
which the artificiaL If not for her, at least for 
humanity as a whole, there is little doubt about 
which is the more normally attainable. It is 
considerably cheaper to sit in a meadow and see 
motors go by than to sit in a motor and see 
meadows go by. 

To me personally, at least, it would never 
seem needful to own a motor, any more than to 
own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you have 
198 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

luck, I am told, is a very swift, successful, and 
thrilling way of coming down a hill. It is dis- 
tinctly more stirring, say, than a glacier, which 
moves an inch in a hundred years. But I do 
not divide these pleasures either by excitement or 
convenience, but by the nature of the thing it- 
self. It seems human to have a horse or bicycle, 
because it seems human to potter about ; and men 
cannot work horses, nor can bicycles work men, 
enormously far afield of their ordinary haunts 
and affairs. 

But about motoring there is something 
magical, like going to the moon; and I say the 
thing should be kept exceptional and felt as 
something breathless and bizarre. My ideal 
hero would own his horse, but would have the 
moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales 
are the only sound guide-books to life ; I like the 
Fairy Prince to ride on a white pony out of his 
father's stables, which are of ivory and gold. 
But if in the course of his adventures he finds it 
necessary to travel on a flaming dragon, I think 
he ought to give the dragon back to the witch 
199 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

at the end of the story. It is a mistake to have 
dragons about the place. 

• • • • • 

For there is truly an air of something weird 
about luxury; and it is by this that healthy 
human nature has always smelt and suspected 
it. All romances that deal in extreme luxury, 
from the " Arabian Nights " to the novels of 
Ouida and Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a 
singular air of dream and occasionally of night- 
mare. In such imaginative debauches there is 
something as occasional as intoxication ; if that 
is still counted occasional. Life in those pre- 
posterous palaces would be an agony of dul- 
ness ; it is clear we are meant to visit them only 
as in a flying vision. And what is true of the 
old freaks of wealth, flavour and fierce colour 
and smell, I would say also of the new freak of 
wealth, which is speed. I should say to the 
duke, when I entered his house at the head of 
an armed mob, " I do not object to your having 
exceptional pleasures, if you have them excep- 
tionally. I do not mind your enjoying the 
^00 



STRANGENESS OF LUXURY 

strange and alien energies of science, if you 
feel them strange and alien, and not your own. 
But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth 
Section of the Eighth Decree of the Republic) 
to hire a motor-car twice a year at Margate, I 
am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, 
the protector of them." 

That is what I should say to the duke. As 
to what the duke would say to me, that is an- 
other matter, and may well be deferred. 



^01 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

Doubtless the unsympathetic might state my 
doctrine that one should not own a motor like 
a horse, but rather use it like a flying dragon 
in the simpler form that I will always go mo- 
toring in somebody else's car. My favourite 
modern philosopher (Mr. W. W. Jacobs) de- 
scribes a similar case of spiritual delicacy mis- 
understood. I have not the book at hand; but 
I think that Job Brown was reproaching Bill 
Chambers for wasteful drunkenness, and Henery 
Walker spoke up for Bill, and said he scarcely 
ever had a glass but what somebody else paid 
for it ; and there was " unpleasantness all round 
then." 

Being less sensitive than Bill Chambers (or 
whoever it was) I will risk this rude perversion 
of my meaning, and concede that I was in a 
motor-car yesterday, and the motor-car most 
certainly was not my own, and the journey, 
202 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

though it contained nothing that is specially 
unusual on such journeys, had running through 
it a strain of the grotesque which was at once 
wholesome and humiliating. The symbol of 
that influence was that ancient symbol of the 
humble and humorous — a donkey. 

When first I saw the donkey I saw him in the 
sunlight as the unearthly gargoyle that he is. 
My friend had met me in his car (I repeat 
firmly, in his car) at the little painted station 
in the middle of the warm wet woods and hop- 
fields of that western country. He proposed to 
drive me first to his house beyond the village 
before starting for a longer spin of adventure, 
and we rattled through those rich green lanes 
which have in them something singularly 
analogous to fairy tales ; whether the lanes pro- 
duced the fairies or (as I believe) the fairies 
produced the lanes. All around in the glim- 
mering hop-yards stood those little hop-kilns 
like stunted and slanting spires. They look 
like dwarfish churches — in fact, rather like 
203 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

many modern churches I could mention, 
churches all of them small and each of them a 
little crooked. In this elfin atmosphere we 
swung round a sharp corner and half-way up a 
steep, white hill, and saw what looked at first 
like a tall, black monster against the sun. It 
appeared to be a dark and dreadful woman 
walking on wheels and waving long ears like a 
bat's. A second glance told me that she was 
not the local witch in a state of transition ; she 
was only one of the million tricks of perspective. 
She stood up in a small wheeled cart drawn by 
a donkey; the donkey's ears were just behind 
her head, and the whole was black against the 
light. 

Perspective is really the comic element in 
everything. It has a pompous Latin name, 
but it is incurably Gothic and grotesque. One 
simple proof of this is that it is always left out 
of all dignified and decorative art. There is 
no perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even 
the essentially angular angels in mediaeval 
stained glass almost always (as it says in " Pa- 
204 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

tience ") contrive to look both angular and flat. 
There is something intrinsically disproportion- 
ate and outrageous in the idea of the distant ob- 
jects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer 
objects swelling enormous and intolerable. 
There is something frantic in the notion that 
one's own father by walking a little way can 
be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. 
There is something farcical in the fancy that 
Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number 
of sizes, according to where he is to stand. All 
soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers; all 
bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ul- 
timate horizon of the world everything was sar- 
donically doomed to stand up laughable and 
little against heaven. 

It was for this reason that the old woman 
and her donkey struck us first when seen from 
behind as one black grotesque. I afterwards 
had the chance of seeing the old woman, the 
cart, and the donkey fairly, in flank and in all 
their length. I saw the old woman and the 
205 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

donkey passant, as they might have appeared 
heraldically on the shield of some heroic family. 
I saw the old woman and the donkey dignified, 
decorative, and flat, as they might have marched 
across the Elgin Marbles. Seen thus under an 
equal light, there was nothing specially ugly 
about them; the cart was long and sufficiently 
comfortable ; the donkey was stolid and suf- 
ficiently respectable; the old woman was lean 
but sufficiently strong, and even smiling in a 
sour, rustic manner. But seen from behind 
they looked like one black monstrous animal; 
the dark donkey ears seemed like dreadful wings, 
and the tall dark back of the woman, erect like 
a tree, seemed to grow taller and taller until one 
could almost scream. 

Then we went by her with a blasting roar like 
a railway train, and fled far from her over the 
brow of the hill to my friend's home. 

There we paused only for my friend to stock 

the car with some kind of picnic paraphernalia, 

and so started again, as it happened, by the 

way we had cohlc. Thus it fell that we went 

206 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

shattering down that short, sharp hill again be- 
fore the poor old woman and her donkey had 
managed to crawl to the top of it; and seeing 
them under a different light, I saw them very 
differently. Black against the sun, they had 
seemed comic; but bright against greenwood 
and grey cloud, they were not comic but tragic ; 
for there are not a few things that seem fan- 
tastic in the twilight, and in the sunlight are 
sad. I saw that she had a grand, gaunt mask 
of ancient honour and endurance, and wide 
eyes sharpened to two shining points, as if 
looking for that small hope on the horizon of 
human life. I also saw that her cart contained 
carrots. 

" Don't you feel, broadly speaking, a beast," 
I asked my friend, " when you go so easily and 
so fast.? " For we had crashed by so that the 
crazy cart must have thrilled in every stick of it. 

My friend was a good man, and said, " Yes. 
But I don't think it would do her any good if I 
went slower." 

" No," I assented after reflection. " Per- 
207 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

haps the only pleasure we can give to her or any 
one else is to get out of their sight very soon." 
My friend availed himself of this advice in no 
niggard spirit; I felt as if we were fleeing for 
our lives in throttling fear after some frightful 
atrocity. In truth, there is only one differ- 
ence left between the secrecy of the two social 
classes : the poor hide themselves in darkness 
and the rich hide themselves in distance. They 
both hide. 

As we shot like a lost boat over a cataract 
down into a whirlpool of white roads far below, 
I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect. 
I looked again : I could hardly believe it. There 
was the slow old woman, with her slow old 
donkey, still toiling along the main road. I 
asked my friend to slacken, but when he said of 
the car, " She's wanting to go," I knew it was 
all up with him. For when you have called a 
thing female you have yielded to it utterly. 
We passed the old woman with a shock that 
must have shaken the earth: if her head did 
208 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

not reel and her heart quail, I know not what 
they were made of. And when we had fled 
perilously on in the gathering dark, spuming 
hamlets behind us, I suddenly called out, " Why, 
what asses we are ! Why, it's She that is brave 
— she and the donkey. We are safe enough; 
we are artillery and plate-armour: and she 
stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! 
If you had grown old in a quiet valley, and peo- 
ple began firing cannon-balls as big as cabs at 
you in your seventieth year, wouldn't you jump 
— and she never moved an eyelid. Oh! we go 
very fast and very far, no doubt " 

As I spoke came a curious noise, and my 
friend, instead of going fast, began to go very 
slow; then he stopped; then he got out. Then 
he said, " And I left the Stepney behind." 

The grey moths came out of the wood and the 
yellow stars came out to crown it, as my friend, 
with the lucidity of despair, explained to me (on 
the soundest scientific principles, of course) that 
nothing would be any good at all. We must 
sleep the night in the lane, except in the very 
209 



TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY 

unlikely event of some one coming by to carry 
a message to some town. Twice I thought I 
heard some tiny sound of such approach, and 
it died away like wind in the trees, and the mo- 
torist was already asleep when I heard it re- 
newed and realised Something certainly was 
approaching. I ran up the road — and there it 
was. Yes, It — and She. Thrice had she come, 
once comic and once tragic and once heroic. 
And when she came again it was as if in pardon 
on a pure errand of prosaic pity and relief. I 
am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh. 
It is not the first time a donkey has been re- 
ceived seriously, nor one riding a donkey with 
respect. 



210 



THE WHEEL 

In a quiet and rustic though fairly famous 
church in my neighbourhood there is a window 
supposed to represent an Angel on a Bicycle. It 
does definitely and indisputably represent a 
nude youth sitting on a wheel; but there is 
enough complication in the wheel and sanctity 
(I suppose) in the youth to warrant this work- 
ing description. It is a thing of florid 
Renascence outline, and belongs to the highly 
pagan period which introduced all sorts of ob- 
jects into ornament: personally I can believe 
in the bicycle more than in the angel. Men, 
they say, are now imitating angels ; in their 
flying-machines, that is: not in any other re- 
spect that I have heard of. So perhaps the 
angel on the bicycle (if he is an angel and if it 
is a bicycle) was avenging himself by imitating 
man. If so, he showed that high order of in- 
tellect which is attributed to angels in the 
211 



THE WHEEL 

mediaeval books, though not always (perhaps) 
in the mediaeval pictures. 

For wheels are the mark of a man quite as 
much as wings are the mark of an angel. 
Wheels are the things that are as old as man- 
kind and yet are strictly peculiar to man; that 
are prehistoric but not pre-human. 

A distinguished psychologist, who is well ac- 
quainted with physiology, has told me that parts 
of himself are certainly levers, while other parts 
are probably pulleys, but that after feeling 
himself carefully all over, he cannot find a 
wheel anywhere. The wheel, as a mode of move- 
ment, is a purely human thing. On the ancient 
escutcheon of Adam (which, like much of the 
rest of his costume, has not yet been discov- 
ered) the heraldic emblem was a wheel — passant. 
As a mode of progress, I say, it is unique. 
Many modern philosophers, like my friend be- 
fore mentioned, are ready to find links between 
man and beast, and to show that man has been 
in all things the blind slave of his mother earth. 
Some, of a very different kind, are even eager to 
^12 



THE WHEEL 

show it; especially if it can be twisted to the 
discredit of religion. But even the most eager 
scientists have often admitted in my hearing 
that they would be surprised if some kind of 
cow approached them moving solemnly on 
four wheels. Wings, fins, flappers, claws, 
hoofs, webs, trotters, with all these the fan- 
tastic families of the earth come against 
us and close around us, fluttering and flap- 
ping and rustling and galloping and lumber- 
ing and thundering; but there is no sound of 
wheels. 

I remember dimly, if, indeed, I remember 
aright, that in some of those dark prophetic 
pages of Scripture, that seem of cloudy purple 
and dusky gold, there is a passage in which the 
seer beholds a violent dream of wheels. Per- 
haps this was indeed the symbolic declaration of 
the spiritual supremacy of man. Whatever 
the birds may do above or the fishes beneath his 
ship, man is the only thing to steer; the only 
thing to be conceived as steering. He may 
make the birds his friends, if he can. He may 



THE WHEEL 

make the fishes his gods, if he chooses. But 
most certainly he will not believe a bird at the 
masthead; and it is hardly likely that he will 
even permit a fish at the helm. He is, as Swin- 
burne says, helmsman and chief: he is literally 
the Man at the Wheel. 

The wheel is an animal that is always stand- 
ing on its head; only it does it so rapidly that 
no philosopher has ever found out which is its 
head. Or if the phrase be felt as more exact, 
it is an animal that is always turning head over 
heels and progressing by this principle. Some 
fish, I think, turn head over heels (supposing 
them, for the sake of argument, to have heels) ; 
I have a dog who nearly did it ; and I did it once 
myself when I was very small. It was an ac- 
cident ; and, as that delightful novelist, Mr. De 
Morgan, would say, it never can happen again. 
Since then no one has accused me of being up- 
side down except mentally : and I rather think 
that there is something to be said for that ; espe- 
cially as typified by the rotary symbol. A 
wheel is the sublime paradox; one part of 
^14 



THE WHEEL 

it is always going forward and the other part 
always going back. Now this, as it happens, 
is highly similar to the proper condition of any 
human soul or any political state. Every sane 
soul or state looks at once backwards and for- 
wards; and even goes backwards to come 
on. 

For those interested in revolt (as I am) I 
only say meekly that one cannot have a Revolu- 
tion without revolving. The wheel, being a 
logical thing, has reference to what is behind 
as well as what is before. It has (as every so- 
ciety should have) a part that perpetually leaps 
helplessly at the sky ; and a part that perpetu- 
ally bows down its head into the dust. Why 
should people be so scornful of us who stand 
on our heads.? Bowing down one's head in the 
dust is a very good thing, the humble beginning 
of all happiness. When we have bowed our 
heads in the dust for a little time, the happiness 
comes ; and then ( leaving our heads in the hum- 
ble and reverent position) we kick up our heels 
behind in the air. That is the true origin of 
215 



THE WHEEL 

standing on one's head; and the ultimate de- 
fence of paradox. The wheel humbles itself to 
be exalted; only it does it a little quicker than 
I do. 



216 



FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE 

Life is full of a ceaseless shower of small coin- 
cidences ; too small to be worth mentioning ex- 
cept for a special purpose, often too trifling 
even to be noticed, any more than we notice one 
snowflake falling on another. It is this that 
lends a frightful plausibility to all false 
doctrines and evil fads. There are always 
such props of accidental arguments upon 
anything. If I said suddenly that historical 
truth is generally told by red-haired men, 
I have no doubt that ten minutes' reflection 
(in which I decline to indulge) would pro- 
vide me with a handsome list of instances 
in support of it. I remember a riotous 
argument about Bacon and Shakespeare 
in which I off^ered quite at random to show 
that Lord Rosebery had written the words 
of Mr. W. B. Yeats. No sooner had I said the 
words than a torrent of coincidences rushed 
217 



FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE 

upon my mind. I pointed out, for instance, 
that Mr. Yeats's chief work was " The Secret 
Rose." This may easily be paraphrased as 
" The Quiet or Modest Rose " ; and so, of course, 
as the Primrose. A second after I saw the same 
suggestion in the combination of " rose " and 
" bury." If I had pursued the matter, who 
knows but I might have been a raving maniac 
by this time. 

We trip over these trivial repetitions and ex- 
actitudes at every turn, only they are too trivial 
even for conversation. A man named Williams 
did walk into a strange house and murder a man 
named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of in- 
fanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance 
did move quite unconsciously from a place called 
Overstrand to a place called Overroads. When 
he had made this escape he was very properly 
pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on 
which a political agent named Bum asked him 
to vote for a political candidate named Bums. 
And when he did so another coincidence hap- 
pened to him : rather a spiritual than a material 
218 



FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE 

coincidence; a mystical thing, a matter of a 
magic number. 

For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I 
know went up to vote in Battersea in a drifting 
and even dubious frame of mind. As the train 
slid through swampy woods and sullen skies 
there came into his empty mind those idle and 
yet awful questions which come when the mind is 
empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them ; 
knaves make profane poems out of them; men 
try to crush them like an ugly lust. Religion is 
only the responsible reinforcement of common 
courage and common sense. Religion only sets 
up the normal mood of health against the hun- 
dred moods of disease. 

But there is this about such ghastly empty 
enigmas, that they always have an answer to the 
obvious answer, the reply offered by daily rea- 
son. Suppose a man's children have gone swim- 
ming; suppose he is suddenly throttled by the 
senseless fear that they are drowned. The ob- 
vious answer is, " Only one man in a thousand 
219 



FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE 

has his children drowned." But a deeper voice 
(deeper, being as deep as hell) answers, " And 
why should not you be the thousandth man? " 
What is true of tragic doubt is true also of 
trivial doubt. The voter's guardian devil said 
to him, " If you don't vote to-day you can do 
fifteen things which will quite certainly do some 
good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, 
please a maddened publisher. And what good 
do you expect to do by voting? You don't 
think your man will get in by one vote, do 
you? " To this he knew the answer of common 
sense, " But if everybody said that, nobody 
would get in at all." And then there came that 
deeper voice from Hades, " But you are not 
settling what everybody shall do, but what one 
person on one occasion shall do. If this after- 
noon you went your way about more solid 
things, how would it matter and who would ever 
know? " Yet somehow the voter drove on 
blindly through the blackening London roads, 
and found somewhere a tedious polling station 
and recorded his tiny vote. 
220 



FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE 

The politician for whom the voter had voted 
got in by five hundred and fifty-five votes. The 
voter read this next morning at breakfast, being 
in a more cheery and expansive mood, and found 
something very fascinating not merely in the 
fact of the majority, but even in the form of it. 
There was something symbolic about the three 
exact figures; one felt it might be a sort of 
motto or cipher. In the great book of seals 
and cloudy symbols there is just such a thun- 
dering repetition. Six hundred and sixty-six was 
the Mark of the Beast. Five hundred and fifty- 
five is the Mark of the Man; the triumphant 
tribune and citizen. A number so symmetrical 
as that really rises out of the region of science 
into the region of art. It is a pattern, like the 
egg-and-dart ornament or the Greek key. One 
might edge a wall-paper or fringe a robe with 
a recurring decimal. And while the voter lux- 
uriated in this light exactitude of the numbers, 
a thought crossed his mind and he almost leapt 
to his feet. " Why, good heavens ! " he cried. 
" I won that election, and it was won by one 
221 



FIVE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE 

vote! But for me it would have been the 
despicable, broken-backed, disjointed, inhar- 
monious figure five hundred and fifty-four. The 
whole artistic point would have vanished. The 
Mark of the Man would have disappeared from 
history. It was I who with a masterful hand 
seized the chisel and carved the hieroglyph — 
complete and perfect. I clutched the trembling 
hand of Destiny when it was about to make a 
dull square four and forced it to make a nice 
curly five. Why, but for me the Cosmos 
would have lost a coincidence ! " After this 
outburst the voter sat down and finished his 
breakfast. 



9.%% 



ETHANDUNE 

Perhaps jou do not know where Ethandune is. 
Nor do I ; nor does anybody. That is where 
the somewhat sombre fun begins. I cannot 
even tell you for certain whether it is the name 
of a forest or a town or a hill. I can only say 
that in any case it is of the kind that floats 
and is unfixed. If it is a forest, it is one of 
those forests that march with a million legs, like 
the walking trees that were the doom of Mac- 
beth. If it is a town, it is one of those towns 
that vanish, like a city of tents. If it is a hill, 
it is a flying hill, like the mountain to which 
faith lends wings. Over a vast dim region of 
England this dark name of Ethandune floats 
like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and 
strike, and, indeed, there were birds of prey 
enough over Ethandune, wherever it was. But 
now Ethandune itself has grown as dark and 
drifting as the black drifts of the birds. 
223 



ETHANDUNE 

And yet without this word that you cannot 
fit with a meaning and hardly with a memory, 
you would be sitting in a very different chair 
at this moment and looking at a very different 
tablecloth. As a practical modern phrase I do 
not commend it ; if my private critics and cor- 
respondents in whom I delight should happen to 
address me " G. K. Chesterton, Poste Restante, 
Ethandune," I fear their letters would not come 
to hand. If two hurried commercial travellers 
should agree to discuss a business matter at 
Ethandune from 5 to 5.15, I am afraid they 
would grow old in the district as white-haired 
wanderers. To put it plainly, Ethandune is 
anywhere and nowhere in the western hills ; it is 
an English mirage. And yet but for this 
doubtful thing you would have probably no 
Daily News on Saturday and certainly no 
church on Sunday. I do not say that either of 
these two things is a benefit; but I do say that 
they are customs, and that you would not pos- 
sess them except through this mystery. You 
would not have Christmas puddings, nor (prob- 
2U 



ETHANDUNE 

ably) any puddings ; you would not have Easter 
eggs, probably not poached eggs, I strongly 
suspect not scrambled eggs, and the best his- 
torians are decidedly doubtful about curried 
eggs. To cut a long story short (the longest 
of all stories), you would not have any civilisa- 
tion, far less any Christian civilisation. And 
if in some moment of gentle curiosity you wish 
to know why you are the polished, sparkling, 
rounded, and wholly satisfactory citizen which 
you obviously are, then I can give you no more 
definite answer geographical or historical; but 
only toll in your ears the tone of the uncap- 
tured name — Ethandune. 

I will try to state quite sensibly why it is as 
important as it is. And yet even that is not 
easy. If I were to state the mere fact from the 
history books, numbers of people would think 
it equally trivial and remote, like some war of 
the Picts and Scots. The points perhaps might 
be put in this way. There is a certain spirit 
in the world which breaks everything off short. 
There may be magnificence in the smashing ; but 
S25 



ETHANDUNE 

the thing is smashed. There may be a certain 
splendour; but the splendour is sterile: it abol- 
ishes all future splendours. I mean (to take 
a working example), York Minster covered with 
flames might happen to be quite as beautiful as 
York Minster covered with carvings. But the 
carvings produce more carvings. The flames 
produce nothing but a little black heap. When 
any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters 
little whether it is done by a book or a sword, 
by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemical bomb. 
The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist 
may be a proud figure when he curses all the 
stars ; the optimist may be an even prouder fig- 
ure when he blesses them all. But the real test 
is not in the energy, but in the effect. When 
the optimist has said, " All things are interest- 
ing," we are left free; we can be interested as 
much or as little as we please. But when the 
pessimist says, " No things are interesting," it 
may be a very witty remark: but it is the last 
witty remark that can be made on the subject. 
He has burnt his cathedral ; he has had his blaze 
226 



ETHANDUNE 

and the rest is ashes. The sceptics, like bees, 
give their one sting and die. The pessimist 
must be wrong, because he says the last word. 

Now, this spirit that denies and that destroys 
had at one period of history a dreadful epoch of 
military superiority. They did burn York 
Minster, or at least, places of the same kind. 
Roughly speaking, from the seventh century to 
the tenth, a dense tide of darkness, of chaos and 
brainless cruelty, poured on these islands and 
on the western coasts of the Continent, which 
well-nigh cut them off from all the white man's 
culture for ever. And this is the final human 
test; that the varied chiefs of that vague age 
were remembered or forgotten according to how 
they had resisted this almost cosmic raid. No- 
body thought of the modern nonsense about 
races ; everybody thought of the human race 
and its highest achievements. Arthur was a 
Celt, and may have been a fabulous Celt; but he 
was a fable on the right side. Charlemagne 
may have been a Gaul or a Goth, but he was not 
a barbarian ; he fought for the tradition against 
227 



ETHANDUNE 

the barbarians, the nihilists. And for this rea- 
son also, for this reason, in the last resort, only, 
we call the saddest and in some ways the least 
successful of the Wessex kings by the title of 
Alfred the Great. Alfred was defeated by the 
barbarians again and again; he defeated the 
barbarians again and again; but his victories 
were almost as vain as his defeats. Fortunately 
he did not believe in the Time Spirit or the 
Trend of Things or any such modern rubbish, 
and therefore kept pegging away. But while 
his failures and his fruitless successes have 
names still in use (such as Wilton, Basing, and 
Ashdown), that last epic battle which really 
broke the barbarian has remained without a 
modern place or name. Except that it was 
near Chippenham, where the Danes gave up 
their swords and were baptised, no one can pick 
out certainly the place where you and I were 
saved from being savages for ever. 

But the other day under a wild sunset and 
moonrise I passed the place which is best reputed 
as Ethandune, a high, grim upland, partly bare 
228 



ETHANDUNE 

and partly shaggy ; like that savage and sacred 
spot in those great imaginative lines about the 
demon lover and the waning moon. The dark- 
ness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and 
lurid moon, the long fantastic shadows, actu- 
ally created that sense of monstrous incident 
which is the dramatic side of landscape. The 
bare grey slopes seemed to rush downhill like 
routed hosts ; the dark clouds drove across like 
riven banners ; and the moon was like a golden 
dragon, like the Golden Dragon of Wessex. 

As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw 
suddenly between myself and the moon a black 
shapeless pile higher than a house. The at- 
mosphere was so intense that I really thought 
of a pile of dead Danes, with some phantom con- 
queror on the top of it. Fortunately I was 
crossing these wastes with a friend who knew 
more history than I; and he told me that this 
was a barrow older than Alfred, older than the 
Romans, older perhaps than the Britons ; and 
no man knew whether it was a wall or a trophy 
or a tomb. Ethandune is still a drifting 
229 



ETHANDUNE 

name; but it gave me a queer emotion to think 
that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured with 
the torrents of their blood down to Chippenham, 
the great king may have lifted up his head and 
looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive of 
something and yet suggestive of nothing; may 
have looked at it as we did, and understood it 
as little as we. 



230 



THE FLAT FREAK 

Some time ago a Sub-Tropical Dinner was 
given by some South African millionaire. I 
forget his name; and so, very likely, does he. 
The humour of this was so subtle and haunting 
that it has been imitated by another millionaire, 
who has given a North Pole Dinner in a grand 
hotel, on which he managed to spend gigantic 
sums of money. I do not know how he did it; 
perhaps they had silver for snow and great 
sapphires for lumps of ice. Anyhow, it seems 
to have cost rather more to bring the Pole to 
London than to take Peary to the Pole. All 
this, one would say, does not concern us. We 
do not want to go to the Pole — or to the hotel. 
I, for one, cannot imagine which would be the 
more dreary and disgusting — the real North 
Pole or the sham one. But as a mere matter 
of psychology (that merry pastime) there is a 
question that is not unentertaining. 
231 



THE FLAT FREAK 

Why is it that all this scheme of ice and 
snow leaves us cold? Why is it that you and 
I feel that we would (on the whole) rather spend 
the evening with two or three stable boys in a 
pothouse than take part in that pallid and Arc- 
tic joke? Why does the modern millionaire's 
jest bore a man to death with the mere thought 
of it? That it does bore a man to death I 
take for granted, and shall do so until some- 
body writes to me in cold ink and tells me that 
he really thinks it funny. 

Now, it is not a sufficient explanation to say 
that the joke is silly. All jokes are silly; that 
is what they are for. If you ask some sincere 
and elemental person, a woman, for instance, 
what she thinks of a good sentence from Dick- 
ens, she will say that it is " too silly." When 
Mr. Weller, senior, assured Mr. Weller, junior, 
that " circumvented " was " a more tenderer 
word " than " circumscribed," the remark was 
at least as silly as it was sublime. It is vain, 
then, to object to " senseless jokes." The very 



THE FLAT FREAK 

definition of a joke is that it need have no sense; 
except that one wild and supernatural sense 
which we call the sense of humour. Humour is 
meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man ; 
that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity 
and hunt him like game. It is meant to remind 
us human beings that we have things about us 
as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the 
elephant or the neck of the giraff*e. If laughter 
does not touch a sort of fundamental folly, it 
does not do its duty in bringing us back to an 
enormous and original simplicity. Nothing has 
been worse than the modern notion that a clever 
man can make a j oke without taking part in it ; 
without sharing in the general absurdity that 
such a situation creates. It is unpardonable 
conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Jok- 
ing is undignified; that is why it is so good 
for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a de- 
tached wit and avoid being a buffoon ; you can- 
not. If you are the Court Jester you must 
be the Court Fool. 

Whatever it is, therefore, that wearies us in 
233 



THE FLAT FREAK 

these wealthy jokes (like the North Pole Din- 
ner) it is not merely that men make fools 
of themselves. When Dickens described Mr. 
Chuckster, Dickens was, strictly speaking, mak- 
ing a fool of himself; for he was making a fool 
out of himself. And every kind of real lark, 
from acting a charade to making a pun, does 
consist in restraining one's nine hundred and 
ninety-nine serious selves and letting the fool 
loose. The dulness of the millionaire joke is 
much deeper. It is not silly at all; it is solely 
stupid. It does not consist of ingenuity lim- 
ited, but merely of inanity expanded. There 
is considerable difference between a wit making 
a fool of himself and a fool making a wit of 
himself. 

. • • • • 

The true explanation, I fancy, may be stated 
thus. We can all remember it in the case of the 
really inspiriting parties and fooleries of our 
youth. The only real fun is to have limited 
materials and a good idea. This explains the 
perennial popularity of impromptu private 
234} 



THE FLAT FREAK 

theatricals. These fascinate because they give 
such a scope for invention and variety with the 
most domestic restriction of machinery. A tea- 
cosy may have to do for an Admiral's cocked 
hat ; it all depends on whether the amateur actor 
can swear like an Admiral. A hearth-rug may 
have to do for a bear's fur; it all depends on 
whether the wearer is a polished and versatile 
man of the world and can grunt like a bear. A 
clergyman's hat (to my own private and cer- 
tain knowledge) can be punched and thumped 
into the exact shape of a policeman's helmet ; it 
all depends on the clergyman. I mean it de- 
pends on his permission; his imprimatur; his 
nihil obstat. Clergymen can be policemen ; rugs 
can rage like wild animals; tea-cosies can smell 
of the sea ; if only there is at the back of them 
all one bright and amusing idea. What is 
really funny about Christmas charades 
in any average home is that there is a con- 
trast between commonplace resources and 
one comic idea. What is deadly dull about 
the millionaire-banquets is that there is a 
235 



THE FLAT FREAK 

contrast between colossal resources and no 

idea. 

• • • • • 

That is the abyss of inanity in such feasts — 
it may be literally called a yawning abyss. The 
abyss is the vast chasm between the money 
power employed and the thing it is employed on. 
To make a big joke out of a broomstick, a bar- 
row and an old hat — that is great. But to 
make a small joke out of mountains of emeralds 
and tons of gold — surely that is humiliating! 
The North Pole is not a very good joke to 
start with. An icicle hanging on one's nose is 
a simple sort of humour in any case. If a set 
of spontaneous mummers got the effect clev- 
erly with cut crystals from the early Victorian 
chandelier there might really be something 
suddenly funny in it. But what should we say 
of hanging diamonds on a hundred human noses 
merely to make that precious j oke about icicles ? 

What can be more abject than the union of 
elaborate and recherche arrangements with an 
old and obvious point? The clown with the 
236 



THE FLAT FREAK 

red-hot poker and the string of sausages is all 
very well in his way. But think of a string of 
pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea a piece ! 
Think of a red-hot poker cut out of a single 
ruby! Imagine such fantasticalities of expense 
with such a tameness and staleness of design. 

We may even admit the practical joke if it is 
domestic and simple. We may concede that 
apple-pie beds and butter-slides are sometimes 
useful things for the education of pompous per- 
sons living the Higher Life. But imagine a man 
making a butter-slide and telling everybody it 
was made with the most expensive butter. Pic- 
ture an apple-pie bed of purple and cloth of 
gold. It is not hard to see that such schemes 
would lead simultaneously to a double boredom ; 
weariness of the costly and complex method and 
of the meagre and trivial thought. This is the 
true analysis, I think, of that chill of tedium 
that strikes to the soul of any intelligent man 
when he hears of such elephantine pranks. That 
is why we feel that Freak Dinners would not 
even be freakish. That is why we feel that ex- 
237 



THE FLAT FREAK 

pensive Arctic feasts would probably be a 

frost. 

• • • • • 

If it be said that such things do no harm, I 
hasten, in one sense, at least, to agree. Far 
from it ; they do good. They do good in the 
most vital matter of modern times ; for they 
prove and print in huge letters the truth which 
our society hiust learn or perish. They prove 
that wealth in society as now constituted does 
not tend to get into the hands of the thrifty or 
the capable, but actually tends to get into the 
hands of wastrels and imbeciles. And it proves 
that the wealthy class of to-day is quite as ig- 
norant about how to enjoy itself as about how 
to rule other people. That it cannot make its 
government govern or its education educate we 
may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; 
but pleasure we do look to see in such a class ; 
and it has surely come to its decrepitude when 
it cannot make its pleasures please. 



238 



THE GARDEN OF THE SEA 

One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier 
type of culture the remark that plain country 
people do not appreciate the beauty of the coun- 
try. This is an error rooted in the intellectual 
pride of mediocrity; and is one of the many 
examples of a truth in the idea that extremes 
meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the 
mob one must either be on a level with it (as I 
am) or be really high up, like the saints. It is 
roughly the same with aesthetics ; slang and rude 
dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, 
but not by a merely bookish taste. And when 
these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not 
talk of Nature in an appreciative way, they 
really mean that they do not talk in a bookish 
way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or 
stones, or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything 
you please. They talk piggishly about pigs; 
and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs ; and are 
239 



THE GARDEN OF THE SEA 

refreshingly horsy about horses. They speak 
in a stony way of stones ; they speak in a cloudy 
way of clouds ; and this is surely the right way. 
And if by any chance a simple intelligent per- 
son from the country comes in contact with any 
aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such 
a person's comment is always worth remark. It 
is sometimes an epigram, and at worst it is never 
a quotation. 

Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy 
imitation and ambiguity the ordinary educated 
person in the big towns could pour out on the 
subject of the sea. A country girl I know in the 
county of Buckingham had never seen the sea in 
her life until the other day. When she was 
asked what she thought of it she said it was 
like cauliflowers. Now that is a piece of pure 
literature — ^vivid, entirely independent and 
original, and perfectly true. I had always been 
haunted with an analogous kinship which I 
could never locate; cabbages always remind me 
of the sea and the sea always reminds me of 
cabbages. It is partly, perhaps, the veined 



THE GARDEN OF THE SEA 

mingling of violet and green, as in the sea a 
purple that is almost dark red may mix with a 
green that is almost yellow, and still be the blue 
sea as a whole. But it is more the grand curves 
of the cabbage that curl over cavernously like 
waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repeti- 
tion, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, 
^schylus and Shakespeare, use a word like 
" multitudinous " of the ocean. But just where 
my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young 
woman rushed (so to speak) to my imaginative 
rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better 
than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking 
as well as curling, and the efflorescence of the 
branching foam, blind, bubbling, and opaque. 
Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested ; 
the arches of the rushing waves have all the 
rigid energy of green stalks, as if the whole sea 
were one great green plant with one immense 
white flower rooted in the abyss. 

Now, a large number of delicate and superior 
persons would refuse to see the force in that 
kitchen garden comparison, because it is not con- 



THE GARDEN OF THE SEA 

nected with any of the ordinary maritime senti- 
ments as stated in books and songs. The 
sesthetic amateur would say that he knew what 
large and philosophical thoughts he ought to 
have by the boundless deep. He would say that 
he was not a greengrocer who would think first 
of greens. To which I should reply, like Ham- 
let, apropos of a parallel profession, " I would 
you were so honest a man." The mention of 
" Hamlet " reminds me, by the way, that be- 
sides the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew 
a girl who had never seen a stage-play. She 
was taken to " Hamlet," and she said it was 
very sad. There is another case of going to 
the primordial point which is overlaid by learn- 
ing and secondary impressions. We are so used 
to thinking of " Hamlet " as a problem that we 
sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy, just 
as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vast 
and vague, that we scarcely notice when it is 
white and green. 

But there is another quarrel involved in which 
the young gentleman of culture comes into 



THE GARDEN OF THE SEA 

violent collision with the young lady of the 
cauliflowers. The first essential of the merely 
bookish view of the sea is that it is boundless, 
and gives a sentiment of infinity. Now it is 
quite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile 
was partly created by exactly the opposite im- 
pression, the impression of boundary and of 
barrier. The girl thought of it as a field of 
vegetables, even as a yard of vegetables. The 
girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity 
when you cannot see it; a sea mist may seem 
endless, but not a sea. So far from being vague 
and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight 
line in Nature. It is the one plain limit; the 
only thing that God has made that really looks 
like a wall. Compared to the sea, not only sun 
and cloud are chaotic and doubtful, but solid 
mountains and standing forests may be said to 
melt and fade and flee in the presence of that 
lonely iron line. The old naval phrase, that the 
seas are England's bulwarks, is not a frigid and 
artificial metaphor; it came into the head of 
some genuine sea-dog, when he was genuinely 
US 



THE GARDEN OF THE SEA 

looking at the sea. For the edge of the sea Is 
like the edge of a sword; it is sharp, military, 
and decisive ; it really looks like a bolt or bar, 
and not like a mere expansion. It hangs in 
heaven, grey, or green, or blue, changing in 
colour, but changeless in form, behind all the 
slippery contours of the land and all the sav- 
age softness of the forests, like the scales of God 
held even. It hangs, a perpetual reminder of 
that divine reason and justice which abides be- 
hind all compromises and all legitimate variety ; 
the one straight line; the limit of the intellect; 
the dark and ultimate dogma of the world. 



244 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

" Sentimentalism is the most broken reed on 
which righteousness can lean " ; these were, I 
think, the exact words of a distinguished Amer- 
ican visitor at the Guildhall, and may Heaven 
forgive me if I do him a wrong. It was spoken 
in illustration of the folly of supporting 
Egyptian and other Oriental nationalism, and it 
has tempted me to some reflections on the first 
word of the sentence. 

The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the 
man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He 
has no sense of honour about ideas ; he will not 
see that one must pay for an idea as for any- 
thing else. He will not see that any worthy 
idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on 
its own terms, and with its logical chain of loy- 
alty. One idea attracts him; another idea 
really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; 
a fourth idea pays him. He will have them all 
245 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter 
how much thej quarrel and contradict each 
other. The Sentimentalist is a philosophic 
profligate, who tries to capture every mental 
beauty without reference to its rival beauties ; 
who will not even be off with the old love before 
he is on with the new. Thus if a man were to 
say, " I love this woman, but I may some day 
find my affinity in some other woman," he would 
be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, " I 
will eat my wedding-cake and keep it." Or if 
a man should say, " I am a Republican, believing 
in the equality of citizens ; but when the Govern- 
ment has given me my peerage I can do infinite 
good as a kind landlord and a wise legislator " ; 
then that man would be a Sentimentalist. He 
would be trying to keep at the same time the 
classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar 
excitement of an aristocrat. Or if a man should 
say, " I am in favour of religious equality ; but I 
must preserve the Protestant Succession," he 
would be a Sentimentalist of a grosser and more 
improbable kind. 

S46 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

This is the essence of the Sentimentalist ; that 
he seeks to enjoy every idea without its sequence, 
and every pleasure without its consequence. 

Now it would really be hard to find a worse 
case of this inconsequent sentimentalism than 
the theory of the British Empire advanced by 
Mr. Roosevelt himself in his attack on Senti- 
mentalists. For the Imperial theory, the Roose- 
velt and Kipling theory, of our relation to East- 
em races is simply one of eating the Oriental 
cake (I suppose a Sultana Cake) and at the 
same time leaving it alone. 

Now there are two sane attitudes of a 
European statesman towards Eastern peoples, 
and there are only two. 

First, he may simply say that the less we have 
to do with them the better; that whether they 
are lower than us or higher they are so catas- 
trophically different that the more we go our 
way and they go theirs the better for all parties 
concerned. I will confess to some tenderness 
for this view. There is much to be said for let- 
ting that calm immemorial life of slave and 
247 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

sultan, temple and palm tree flow on as it has 
always flowed. The best reason of all, the rea- 
son that aff^ects me most finally, is that if we 
left the rest of the world alone we might have 
some time for attending to our own aff*airs, 
which are urgent to the point of excruciation. 
All history points to this ; that intensive cultiva- 
tion in the long run triumphs over the widest 
extensive cultivation; or, in other words, that 
making one's own field superior is far more ef- 
fective than reducing other people's fields to in- 
feriority. If you cultivate your own garden 
and grow a specially large cabbage, people will 
probably come to see it. Whereas the life of 
one selling small cabbages round the whole dis- 
trict is often forlorn. 

Now, the Imperial Pioneer is essentially a 
commercial traveller ; and a commercial traveller 
is essentially a person who goes to see people 
because they don't want to see him. As long 
as empires go about urging their ideas on 
others, I always have a notion that the ideas 
are no good. If they were really so splendid, 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

they would make the country preaching them 
a wonder of the world. That is the true ideal; 
a great nation ought not to be a hammer, but a 
magnet. Men went to the mediaeval Sorbonne 
because it was worth going to. Men went to 
old Japan because only there could they find 
the unique and exquisite old Japanese art. No- 
body will ever go to modern Japan (nobody 
worth bothering about, I mean), because mod- 
em Japan has made the huge mistake of going 
to the other people : becoming a common empire. 
The mountain has condescended to Mahomet; 
and henceforth Mahomet will whistle for it when 
he wants it. 

That is my political theory: that we should 
make England worth copying instead of telling 
everybody to copy her. 

But it is not the only possible theory. There 
is another view of our relations to such places 
as Egypt and India which is entirely tenable. 
It may be said, " We Europeans are the heirs 
of the Roman Empire ; when all is said we have 
249 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

the largest freedom, the most exact science, the 
most solid romance. We have a deep though 
undefined obligation to give as we have received 
from God; because the tribes of men are truly 
thirsting for these things as for water. All 
men really want clear laws: we can give clear 
laws. All men really want hygiene : we can give 
hygiene. We are not merely imposing Western 
ideas. We are simply fulfilling human ideas — 
for the first time." 

On this line, I think, it is possible to justify 
the forts of Africa and the railroads of Asia ; but 
on this line we must go much further. If it is 
our duty to give our best, there can be no doubt 
about what is our best. The greatest thing our 
Europe has made is the Citizen : the idea of the 
average man, free and full of honour, volun- 
tarily invoking on his own sin the just vengeance 
of his city. All else we have done is mere ma- 
chinery for that: railways exist only to carry 
the Citizen ; forts only to defend him ; electricity 
only to light him, medicine only to heal him. 
Popularism, the idea of the people alive and pa- 
250 



THE SENTIMENTALIST 

tiently feeding history, that we cannot give; 
for it exists everywhere, East and West. But 
democracy, the idea of the people fighting and 
governing — that is the only thing we have to 
give. 

Those are the two roads. But between them 
weakly wavers the Sentimentalist — that is, the 
Imperialist of the Roosevelt school. He wants 
to have it both ways ; to have the splendours of 
success without the perils. Europe may enslave 
Asia, because it is flattering: but Europe must 
not free Asia, because that is responsible. It 
tickles his Imperial taste that Hindoos should 
have European hats : it is too dangerous if they 
have European heads. He cannot leave Asia 
Asiatic: yet he dare not contemplate Asia as 
European. Therefore he proposes to have in 
Egypt railway signals, but not flags; despatch 
boxes, but not ballot boxes. 

In short, the Sentimentalist decides to spread 
the body of Europe without the soul. 



S51 



THE WHITE HORSES 

It is within my experience, which is very brief 
and occasional in this matter, that it is not really 
at all easy to talk in a motor-car. This is for- 
tunate ; first, because, as a whole, it prevents 
me from motoring ; and second because, at any 
given moment, it prevents me from talking. The 
difficulty is not wholly due to the physical con- 
ditions, though these are distinctly unconversa- 
tional. FitzGerald's Omar, being a pessimist, 
was probably rich, and being a lazy fellow, was 
almost certainly a motorist. If any doubt 
could exist on the point, it is enough to saj 
that, in speaking of the foolish profits, Omar has 
defined the difficulties of colloquial motoring 
with a precision which cannot be accidental. 
" Their words to wind are scattered ; and their 
mouths are stopped with dust." From this 
follows not (as many of the cut-and-dried 
philosophers would say) a savage silence and 
252 



THE WHITE HORSES 

mutual hostility, but rather one of those rich 
silences that make the mass and bulk of 
all friendship ; the silence of men rowing 
the same boat or fighting in the same battle- 
line. 

It happened that the other day I hired a mo- 
tor-car, because I wanted to visit in very rapid 
succession the battle-places and hiding-places 
of Alfred the Great; and for a thing of this 
sort a motor is really appropriate. It is not by 
any means the best way of seeing the beauty of 
the country ; you see beauty better by walking, 
and best of all by sitting still. But it is a good 
method in any enterprise that involves a parody 
of the military or governmental quality — any- 
thing which needs to know quickly the whole 
contour of a county or the rough, relative posi- 
tion of men and towns. On such a journey, 
like jagged lightning, I sat from morning till 
night by the side of the chauffeur; and we 
scarcely exchanged a word to the hour. But by 
the time the yellow stars came out in the villages 
and the white stars in the skies, I think I under- 
253 



THE WHITE HORSES 

stood his character; and I fear he understood 
mine. 

He was a Cheshire man with a sour, patient, 
and humorous face; he was modest, though a 
north countryman, and genial, though an ex- 
pert. He spoke (when he spoke at all) with a 
strong northland accent; and he evidently was 
new to the beautiful south country, as was clear 
both from his approval and his complaints. But 
though he came from the north he was agri- 
cultural and not commercial in origin ; he looked 
at the land rather than the towns, even if he 
looked at it with a somewhat more sharp and 
utilitarian eye. His first remark for some 
hours was uttered when we were crossing the 
more coarse and desolate heights of Salisbury 
Plain. He remarked that he had always 
thought that Salisbury Plain was a plain. This 
alone showed that he was new to the vicinity. 
But he also said, with a critical frown, " A lot 
of this land ought to be good land enough. Why 
don't they use it?" He was then silent for 
some more hours. 

254 



THE WHITE HORSES 

At an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead 
down from what is called (with no little humour) 
Salisbury Plain, I saw suddenly, as by accident, 
something I was looking for — that is, something 
I did not expect to see. We are all supposed 
to be trying to walk into heaven ; but we should 
be uncommonly astonished if we suddenly walked 
into it. As I was leaving Salisbury Plain (to 
put it roughly) I lifted up my eyes and saw the 
White Horse of Britain. 

One or two truly fine poets of the Tory and 
Protestant type, such as Swinburne and Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling, have eulogised England un- 
der the image of white horses, meaning the white- 
maned breakers of the Channel. This is right 
and natural enough. The true philosophical 
Tory goes back to ancient things because he 
thinks they will be anarchic things. It would 
startle him very much to be told that there are 
white horses of artifice in England that may be 
older than those wild white horses of the ele- 
ments. Yet it is truly so. Nobody knows how 
old are those strange green and white 
^55 



THE WHITE HORSES 

hieroglyphics, those stragghng quadrupeds of 
chalk, that stand out on the sides of so many of 
the Southern Downs. They are possibly older 
than Saxon and older than Roman times. They 
may well be older than British, older than any 
recorded times. They may go back, for all we 
know, to the first faint seeds of human life on 
this planet. Men may have picked a horse out 
of the grass long before they scratched a horse 
on a vase or pot, or messed and massed any 
horse out of clay. This may be the oldest 
human art — before building or graving. And if 
so, it may have first happened in another 
geological age; before the sea burst through 
the narrow Straits of Dover. The White Horse 
may have begun in Berkshire when there were no 
white horses at Folkestone or Newhaven. That 
rude but evident white outline that I saw across 
the valley may have been begun when Brit- 
ain was not an island. We forget that 
there are many places where art is older than 
nature. 

We took a long detour through somewhat 
256 



THE WHITE HORSES 

easier roads, till we came to a breach or chasm 
in the valley, from which we saw our friend the 
White Horse once more. At least, we thought 
it was our friend the White Horse ; but after a 
little inquiry we discovered to our astonishment 
that it was another friend and another horse. 
Along the leaning flanks of the same fair valley 
there was (it seemed) another white horse, as 
rude and as clean, as ancient and as modern, 
as the first. This, at least, I thought must be 
the aboriginal White Horse of Alfred, which I 
had always heard associated with his name. And 
ye^ before we had driven into Wantage and seen 
King Alfred's quaint grey statue in the sun, we 
had seen yet a third white horse. And the third 
white horse was so hopelessly unlike a horse 
that we were sure that it was genuine. The final 
and original white horse, the white horse of the 
White Horse Vale, has that big, babyish quality 
that truly belongs to our remotest ancestors. It 
really has the prehistoric, preposterous quality 
of Zulu or New Zealand native drawings. This 
at least was surely made by our fathers when 
257 



THE WHITE HORSES 

they were barely men ; long before they were civ- 
ilised men. 

But why was it made? Why did barbarians 
take so much trouble to make a horse nearly as 
big as a hamlet; a horse who could bear no 
hunter, who could drag no load? What was 
this titanic, sub-conscious instinct for spoiling a 
beautiful green slope with a very ugly white 
quadruped? What (for the matter of that) 
is this whole hazardous fancy of humanity ruling 
the earth, which may have begun with white 
horses, which may by no means end with twenty 
horse-power cars ? As I rolled away out of that 
country, I was still cloudily considering how 
ordinary men ever came to want to make such 
strange chalk horses, when my chauffeur startled 
me by speaking for the first time for nearly two 
hours. He suddenly let go one of the handles 
and pointed at a gross green bulk of down that 
happened to swell above us. 

" That would be a good place," he said. 

Naturally I referred to his last speech of 
some hours before ; and supposed he meant that 
^58 



THE WHITE HORSES 

it would be promising for agriculture. As a 
fact, it was quite unpromising; and this made 
me suddenly understand the quiet ardour in his 
eye. All of a sudden I saw what he really 
meant. He really meant that this would be a 
splendid place to pick out another white horse. 
He knew no more than I did why it was done; 
but he was in some unthinkable prehistoric tradi- 
tion, because he wanted to do it. He became so 
acute in sensibility that he could not bear to 
pass any broad breezy hill of grass on which 
there was not a, white horse. He could hardly 
keep his hands off the hills. He could hardly 
leave any of the living grass alone. 

Then I left off wondering why the primitive 
man made so many white horses. I left off 
troubling in what sense the ordinary eternal man 
had sought to scar or deface the hills. I was 
content to know that he did want it ; for I had 
seen him wanting it. 



259 



THE LONG BOW 

I FIND myself still sitting in front of the last 
book by Mr. H. G. Wells, I say stunned with 
admiration, my family says sleepy with fatigue. 
I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's 
book which I agree with ; and I still feel vividly 
the one thing that I deny. I deny that biology 
can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can 
even desire biology. No truth which I find can 
deny that I am seeking the truth. My mind 
cannot find anything which denies my mind. 
. . . But what is all this.? This is no sort of 
talk for a genial essay. Let us change the sub- 
ject ; let us have a romance or a fable or a fairy 

tale. 

• • • • • 

Come, let us tell each other stories. There 

was once a king who was very fond of listening 

to stories, like the king in the Arabian Nights. 

The only difference was that, unlike that cynical 

260 



THE LONG BOW 

Oriental, this king believed all the stories that 
he heard. It is hardly necessary to add that he 
lived in England. His face had not the swarthy 
secrecy of the tyrant of the thousand tales ; on 
the contrary, his eyes were as big and innocent 
as two blue moons; and when his yellow beard 
turned totally white he seemed to be growing 
younger. Above him hung still his heavy sword 
and horn, to remind men that he had been a tall 
hunter and warrior in his time : indeed, with that 
rusted sword he had wrecked armies. But he 
was one of those who will never know the world, 
even when they conquer it. Besides his love of 
this old Chaucerian pastime of the telling of 
tales, he was, like many old English kings, spe- 
cially interested in the art of the bow. He 
gathered round him great archers of the stature 
of Ulysses and Robin Hood, and to four of 
these he gave the whole government of his king- 
dom. They did not mind governing his king- 
dom ; but they were sometimes a little bored with 
the necessity of telling him stories. None of 
their stories were true ; but the king believed all 
261 



THE LONG BOW 

of them, and this became very depressing. They 
created the most preposterous romances; and 
could not get the credit of creating them. Their 
true ambition was sent empty away. They 
were praised as archers; but they desired to be 
praised as poets. They were trusted as men, 
but they would rather have been admired as 
literary men. 

At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed 
themselves into a club or conspiracy with the 
object of inventing some story which even the 
king could not swallow. They called it The 
League of the Long Bow ; thus attaching them- 
selves by a double bond to their motherland of 
England, which has been steadily celebrated 
since the Norman Conquest for its heroic arch- 
ery and for the extraordinary credulity of its 
people. 

At last it seemed to the four archers that their 
hour had come. The king commonly sat in a 
green curtained chamber, which opened by four 
doors, and was surmounted by four turrets. 
Summoning his champions to him on an April 
S62 



THE LONG BOW 

evening, he sent out each of them by a separate 
door, telling him to return at morning with the 
tale of his journey. Every champion bowed 
low, and, girding on great armour as for awful 
adventures, retired to some part of the garden 
to think of a lie. They did not want to think 
of a lie which would deceive the king; any lie 
would do that. They wanted to think of a lie 
so outrageous that it would not deceive him, 
and that was a serious matter. 

The first archer who returned was a dark, 
quiet, clever fellow, very dexterous in small mat- 
ters of mechanics. He was more interested in 
the science of the bow than in the sport of it. 
Also he would only shoot at a mark, for he 
thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds, and 
atrocious to kill men. When he left the king 
he had gone out into the wood and tried all sorts 
of tiresome experiments about the bending of 
branches and the impact of arrows ; when even he 
found it tiresome he returned to the house of 
the four turrets and narrated his adventure. 
" Well," said the king, " what have you been 
26S 



THE LONG BOW 

shooting? " " Arrows," answered the archer. 
" So I suppose," said the king, smiling; " but I 
mean, I mean what wild things have you shot? " 
" I have shot nothing but arrows," answered the 
bowman obstinately. " When I went out on to 
the plain I saw in a crescent the black army of 
the Tartars, the terrible archers whose bows 
are of bended steel, and their bolts as big as 
javelins. They spied me afar off, and the 
shower of their arrows shut out the sun and 
made a rattling roof above me. You know, I 
think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or even a 
Tartar. But such is the precision and rapidity 
of perfect science that, with my own arrows, I 
split every arrow as it came against me. I struck 
every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird. 
Therefore, Sire, I may say truly, that I shot 
nothing but arrows." The king said, " I know 
how clever you engineers are with your fingers." 
The archer said, " Oh," and went out. 

The second archer, who had curly hair and 
was pale, poetical, and rather effeminate, had 
merely gone out into the garden and stared at 
S64 



THE LONG BOW 

the moon. When the moon had become too 
wide, blank, and watery, even for his own wide, 
blank, and watery eyes, he came in again. And 
when the king said " What have you been shoot- 
ing? " he answered with great volubility, " I 
have shot a man ; not a man from Tartary, not a 
man from Europe, Asia, Africa, or America; 
not a man on this earth at all. I have shot the 
Man in the Moon." " Shot the Man in the 
Moon? " repeated the king with something like 
a mild surprise. " It is easy to prove it," said 
the archer with hysterical haste. " Examine 
the moon through this particularly powerful 
telescope, and you will no longer find any 
traces of a man there." The king glued his big 
blue idiotic eye to the telescope for about ten 
minutes, and then said, " You are right : as you 
have often pointed out, scientific truth can only 
be tested by the senses. I believe you." And 
the second archer went out, and being of a more 
emotional temperament burst into tears. 

The third archer was a savage, brooding sort 
of man with tangled hair and dreamy eyes, and 
^65 



THE LONG BOW 

he came in without any preface, saying, " I have 
lost all my arrows. They have turned into 
birds." Then as he sa\^ that they all stared at 
him, he said, " Well, you know everything 
changes on the earth ; mud turns into marigolds, 
eggs turn into chickens ; one can even breed dogs 
into quite different shapes. Well, I shot my 
arrows at the awful eagles that clash their wings 
round the Himalayas ; great golden eagles as big 
as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perch- 
ing on them. My arrows fled so far over 
mountain and valley that they turned slowly into 
fowls in their flight. See here," and he threw 
down a dead bird and laid an arrow beside it. 
" Can't you see tliey are the same structure? 
The straight shaft is the backbone; the sharp 
point is the beak ; the feather is the rudimentary 
plumage. It is merely modification and evolu- 
tion." After a silence the king nodded gravely 
and said, " Yes ; of course everything is evolu- 
tion." At this the third archer suddenly and 
violently left the room, and was heard in 
some distant part of the building making 
266 



THE LONG BOW 

extraordinary noises either of sorrow or of 
mirth. 

The fourth archer was a stunted man with a 
face as dead as wood, but with wicked little eyes 
close together, and very much alive. His com- 
rades dissuaded him from going in because they 
said that they had soared up into the seventh 
heaven of living lies, and that there was literally 
nothing which the old man would not believe. 
The face of the little archer became a little more 
wooden as he forced his way in, and when he was 
inside he looked round with blinking bewilder- 
ment. " Ha, the last," said the king heartily, 
" welcome back again ! " There was a long 
pause, and then the stunted archer said, " What 
do you mean by ' again ' ? I have never been 
here before." The king stared for a few sec- 
onds, and said, " I sent you out from this room 
with the four doors last night." After another 
pause the little man slowly shook his head. " I 
never saw you before," he said simply ; " you 
never sent me out from anywhere. I only saw 
your four turrets in the distance, and strayed in 
267 



THE LONG BOW 

here by accident. I was bom in an island in the 
Greek Archipelago ; I am by profession an auc- 
tioneer, and my name is Punk." The king sat 
on his throne for seven long instants like a 
statue ; and then there awoke in his mild and an- 
cient eyes an awful thing; the complete convic- 
tion of untruth. Every one has felt it who has 
found a child obstinately false. He rose to his 
height and took down the heavy sword above 
him, plucked it out naked, and then spoke. " I 
will believe your mad tales about the exact ma- 
chinery of arrows ; for that is science. I will be- 
lieve your mad tales about traces of life in the 
moon; for that is science. I will believe your 
mad tales about jellyfish turning into gentlemen, 
and everything turning into anything; for that 
is science. But I will not believe you when 
you tell me what I know to be untrue. I will 
not believe you when you say that you did not 
all set forth under my authority and out of my 
house. The other three may conceivably have 
told the truth; but this last man has certainly 
lied. Therefore I will kill him." And with 
S68 



THE LONG BOW 

that the old and gentle king ran at the man 
with uplifted sword ; but he was arrested by the 
roar of happy laughter, which told the world 
that there is, after all, something which an Eng- 
lishman will not swallow. 



269 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

Mr. Vernon-Smith, of Trinity, and the Social 
Settlement, Tooting, author of " A Higher Lon- 
don " and " The Boyg System at Work," came 
to the conclusion, after looking through his 
select and even severe library, that Dickens's 
" Christmas Carol " was a very suitable thing to 
be read to charwomen. Had they been men 
they would have been forcibly subjected to 
Browning's " Christmas Eve " with exposi- 
tion, but chivalry spared the charwomen, and 
Dickens was funny, and could do no harm. 
His fellow worker Wimpole would read 
things like " Three Men in a Boat " to the 
poor; but Vernon-Smith regarded this as a 
sacrifice of principle, or (what was the same 
thing to him) of dignity. He would not 
encourage them in their vulgarity; they should 
have nothing from him that was not literature. 
Still Dickens was literature after all; not 
270 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

literature of a high order, of course, not 
tlioughtful or purposeful literature, but litera- 
ture quite fitted for charwomen on Christmas 
Eve. 

He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens 
without due antidotes of warning and criticism. 
He explained that Dickens was not a writer of 
the first rank, since he lacked the high serious- 
ness of Matthew Arnold. He also feared that 
they would find the characters of Dickens ter- 
ribly exaggerated. But they did not, possibly 
because they were meeting them every day. For 
among the poor there are still exaggerated char- 
acters; they do not go to the Universities to 
be universified. He told the charwomen, with 
progressive brightness, that a mad wicked old 
miser like Scrooge would be really quite impos- 
sible now ; but as each of the charwomen had an 
uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who 
was exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was 
not shared. Indeed, the lecture as a whole 
lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, 
and towards the end he found himself rambling, 
^71 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

and in a sort of abstraction, talking to them as 
if they were his fellows. He caught himself say- 
ing quite mystically that a spiritual plane (by 
which he meant his plane) always looked to those 
on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merely 
austere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard 
Shaw, that we could all go to heaven just as we 
can all go to a classical concert, but if we did 
it would bore us. Realising that he was taking 
his flock far out of their depth, he ended some- 
what hurriedly, and was soon receiving that gen- 
erous applause which is a part of the profound 
ceremonialism of the working classes. As he 
made his way to the door three people stopped 
him, and he answered them heartily enough, but 
with an air of hurry which he would not have 
dreamed of showing to people of his own class. 
One was a little school-mistress who told him 
with a sort of feverish meekness that she was 
troubled because an Ethical Lecturer had said 
that Dickens was not really Progressive; but 
she thought he was Progressive; and surely he 
%s)as Progressive. Of what being Progressive 
272 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

was she had no more notion than a whale. The 
second person implored him for a subscription 
to some soup kitchen or cheap meal; and his 
refined features sharpened; for this, like litera- 
ture, was a matter of principle with him. " Quite 
the wrong method," he said, shaking his head 
and pushing past. " Nothing any good but the 
Bojg system." The third stranger, who was 
male, caught him on the step as he came out into 
the snow and starlight; and asked him point 
blank for money. It was a part of Vernon- 
Smith's principles that all such persons are pros- 
perous impostors ; and like a true mystic he held 
to his principles in defiance of his five senses, 
which told him that the night was freezing and 
the man very thin and weak. " If you come to 
the Settlement between four and five on Friday 
week," he said, " inquiries will be made." The 
man stepped back into the snow with a not un- 
graceful gesture as of apology; he had frosty 
silver hair, and his lean face, though in shadow, 
seemed to wear something like a smile. As 
Vemon-Sraith stepped briskly into the street, the 
273 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

man stooped down as if to do up his bootlace. 
He was, however, guiltless of any such dandy- 
ism ; and as the young philanthropist stood pull- 
ing on his gloves with some particularity, a 
heavy snowball was suddenly smashed into his 
face. He was blind for a black instant; then 
as some of the snow fell, saw faintly, as in a 
dim mirror of ice or dreamy crystal, the lean 
man bowing with the elegance of a dancing 
master, and saying amiably, " A Christmas box." 
When he had quite cleared his face of snow the 
man had vanished. 

For three burning minutes Cyril Vernon- 
Smith was nearer to the people and more their 
brother than he had been in his whole high- 
stepping pedantic existence; for if he did not 
love a poor man, he hated one. And you never 
really regard a labourer as your equal until you 
can quarrel with him. " Dirty cad ! " he mut- 
tered. " Filthy fool ! Mucking with snow like 
a beastly baby! When will they be civilised? 
Why, the very state of the street is a disgrace 
and a temptation to such tomfools. Why isn't 
274 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

all this snow cleared away and the street made 
decent?" 

To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, 
something to complain of in the condition of the 
road. Snow was banked up on both sides in 
white walls, and towards the other and darker 
end of the street even rose into a chaos of low 
colourless hills. By the time he reached them 
he was nearly knee deep, and was in a far from 
philanthropic frame of mind. The solitude of 
the little streets was as strange as their white 
obstruction, and before he had ploughed his 
way much further he was convinced that he had 
taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon some 
formless suburb unvisited before. There was no 
light in any of the low, dark houses ; no light in 
anything but the blank emphatic snow. He 
was modem and morbid ; hellish isolation hit and 
held him suddenly ; anything human would have 
relieved the strain, if it had been only the leap of 
a garotter. Then the tender human touch came 
indeed; for another snowball struck him, and 
made a star on his back. He turned with fierce 
215 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

joy, and ran after a boy escaping; ran with 
dizzy and violent speed, he knew not for how 
long. He wanted the boy; he did not know 
whether he loved or hated him. He wanted 
humanity ; he did not know whether he loved or 
hated it. 

As he ran he realised that the landscape 
around him was changing in shape though not 
in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and 
disappear in hills of snow as if buried ; the snow 
seemed to rise in tattered outlines of crag and 
cliff and crest, but he thought nothing of all 
these impossibilities until the boy turned to bay. 
When he did he saw the child was queerly beau- 
tiful, with gold red hair, and a face as serious as 
complete happiness. And when he spoke to the 
boy his own question surprised him, for he said 
for the first time in his life, " What am I doing 
here ? " And the little boy, with very grave 
eyes, answered, " I suppose you are dead." 

He had (also for the first time) a doubt of 
his spiritual destiny. He looked round on a 
towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains, 
^76 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

and said, " Is this hell? " And as the child 
stared, but did not answer, he knew it was 
heaven. 

All over that colossal country, white as the 
world round the Pole, little boys were playing, 
rolling each other down dreadful slopes, crush- 
ing each other under falling cliffs ; for heaven is 
a place where one can fight for ever without 
hurting. Smith suddenly remembered how 
happy he had been as a child, rolling about on 
the safe sandhills around Conway. 

Right above Smith's head, higher than the 
cross of St. Paul's, but curving over him like 
the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a 
cavernous crag of snow. A hundred feet below 
him, like a landscape seen from a balloon, lay 
snowy flats as white and as far away. He saw 
a little boy stagger, with many catastrophic 
slides, to that toppling peak ; and seizing another 
little boy by the leg, send him flying away down 
to the distant silver plains. There he sank and 
vanished in the snow as if in the sea ; but coming 
up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep 
277 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

once more, rolling before him a great gathering 
snowball, gigantic at last, which he hurled back 
at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy 
and the mountain down in one avalanche to the 
level of the vale. The other boy also sank like 
a stone, and also rose again like a bird, but 
Smith had no leisure to concern himself with this. 
For the collapse of that celestial crest had left 
him standing solitary in the sky on a peak like 
a church spire. 

He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the 
valley below, and he knew by their attitudes that 
they were eagerly telling him to jump. Then 
for the first time he knew the nature of faith, 
as he had just known the fierce nature of char- 
ity. Or rather for the second time, for he re- 
membered one moment when he had known faith 
before. It was when his father had taught him 
to swim, and he had believed he could float on 
water not only against reason, but (what is so 
much harder) against instinct. Then he had 
trusted water ; now he must trust air. 

He jumped. He went through air and then 
278 



THE MODERN SCROOGE 

through snow with the same blinding swiftness. 
But as he buried himself in solid snow like a 
bullet he seemed to learn a million things and to 
learn them all too fast. He knew that the 
whole world is a snowball, and that all the stars 
are snowballs. He knew that no man will be fit 
for heaven till he loves solid whiteness as a 
little boy loves a ball of snow. 

He sank and sank and sank . . . and then, 
as usually happens in such cases, woke up, with a 
start — in the street. True, he was taken up 
for a common drunk, but (if you properly ap- 
preciate his conversion) you will realise that he 
did not mind; since the crime of drunkenness is 
infinitely less than that of spiritual pride, of 
which he had really been guilty. 



r[9 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

By high plains I do not mean table-lands ; table- 
lands do not interest one very much. They 
seem to involve the bore of a climb without the 
pleasure of a peak. Also they are vaguely as- 
sociated with Asia and those enormous armies 
that eat up everything like locusts, as did the 
army of Xerxes ; with emperors from nowhere 
spreading their battalions everywhere ; with the 
white elephants and the painted horses, the dark 
engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of 
the moving empires of the East; with all that 
evil insolence in short that rolled into Europe 
in the youth of Nero, and after having been 
battered about and abandoned by one Christian 
nation after another, turned up in England with 
Disraeli and was christened (or rather paganed) 
Imperialism. 

Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do 
not mean " high planes " such as the Theosp'f 
^80 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

phists and the Higher Thought Centres talk 
about. They spell theirs differently; but I will 
not have theirs in any spelling. They, I know, 
are always expounding how this or that person 
is on a lower plane, while they (the speakers) are 
on a higher plane: sometimes they will almost 
tell you what plane, as " 599a " or " Plane F, 
sub-plane 304." I do not mean this sort of 
height either. My religion says nothing about 
such planes except that all men are on one plane 
and that by no means a high one. There are 
saints indeed in my religion: but a saint 
only means a man who really knows he is a 
sinner. 

Why then should I talk of the plains as high.? 
I do it for a rather singular reason, which I 
will illustrate by a parallel. When I was at 
school learning all the Greek I have ever for- 
gotten, I was puzzled by the phrase olvov fxeXav, 
that is " black wine," which continually oc- 
curred. I asked what it meant, and many 
most interesting and convincing answers were 
given. It was pointed out that we know little 
^8X 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

of the actual liquid drunk by the Greeks ; that 
the analogy of modem Greek wines may suggest 
that it was dark and sticky, perhaps a sort of 
syrup always taken with water; that archaic 
language about colour is always a little dubious, 
as where Homer speaks of the " wine-dark sea " 
and so on. I was very properly satisfied, and 
never thought of the matter again; until one 
day, having a decanter of claret in front of me, 
I happened to look at it. I then perceived that 
they called wine black because it is black. Very 
thin, diluted, or held-up abruptly against a 
flame, red wine is red ; but seen in body in most 
normal shades and semi-lights red wine is black, 
and therefore was called so. 

On the same principles I call the plains high 
because the plains always are high; they are 
always as high as we are. We talk of climbing 
a mountain crest and looking down at the plain ; 
but the phrase is an illusion of our arrogance. 
It is impossible even to look down at the plain. 
For the plain itself rises as we rise. It is not 
merely true that the higher we climb the wider 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

and wider is spread out below us the wealth of 
the world; it is not merely that the devil or 
some other respectable guide for tourists takes 
us to the top of an exceeding high mountain 
and shows us all the kingdoms of the earth. It 
is more than that, in our real feeling of it. It 
is that in a sense the whole world rises with us 
roaring, and accompanies us to the crest like 
some clanging chorus of eagles. The plains 
rise higher and higher like swift grey walls piled 
up against invisible invaders. And however 
high a peak you climb, the plain is still as high 
as the peak. 

The mountain tops are only noble because 
from them we are privileged to behold the plains. 
So the only value in any man being superior is 
that he may have a superior admiration for the 
level and the common. If there is any profit in 
a place craggy and precipitous it is only be- 
cause from the vale it is not easy to see all the 
beauty of the vale ; because when actually in the 
flats one cannot see their sublime and satisfying 
flatness. If there is any value in being educated 
S83 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

or eminent (which is doubtful enough) it is only 
because the best instructed man may feel most 
swiftly and certainly the splendour of the ig- 
norant and the simple: the full magnificence of 
that mighty human army in the plains. The 
general goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers, 
not to look down at his soldiers. He withdraws 
himself not because his regiment is too small to 
be touched, but because it is too mighty to be 
seen. The chief climbs with submission and 
goes higher with great humility; since in order 
to take a bird's eye view of everything, he must 
become small and distant like a bird. 

The most marvellous of those mystical cava- 
liers who wrote intricate and exquisite verse in 
England in the seventeenth century, I mean 
Henry Vaughan, put the matter in one line, in- 
trinsically immortal and practically forgotten — 

*' Oh holy hope and high humihty." 

That adjective " high " is not only one of the 

sudden and stunning inspirations of literature; 

it is also one of the greatest and gravest defini- 

284 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

tions of moral science. However far aloft a 
man may go, he is still looking up, not only at 
God (which is obvious), but in a manner at men 
also : seeing more and more all that is towering 
and mysterious in the dignity and destiny of the 
lonely house of Adam. I wrote some part of 
these rambling remarks on a high ridge of rock 
and turf overlooking a stretch of the central 
counties ; the rise was slight enough in reality, 
but the immediate ascent had been so steep and 
sudden that one could not avoid the fancy that 
on reaching the summit one would look down at 
the stars. But one did not look down at the 
stars, but rather up at the cities ; seeing as high 
in heaven the palace town of Alfred like a lit 
sunset cloud, and away in the void spaces, like 
a planet in eclipse, Salisbury. So, it may be 
hoped, until we die you and I will always look up 
rather than down at the labours and the hab- 
itations of our race ; we will lift up our eyes to 
the valleys from whence cometh our help. For 
from every special eminence and beyond every 
sublime landmark, it is good for our souls 
285 



THE HIGH PLAINS 

to see only vaster and vaster visions of 
that dizzy and divine level; and to behold 
from our crumbling turrets the tall plains of 
equality. 



286 



THE CHORUS 

One of the most marked instances of the decline 
of true popular sympathy is the gradual disap- 
pearance in our time of the habit of singing in 
chorus. Even when it is done nowadays it is 
done tentatively and sometimes inaudibly; ap- 
parently upon some preposterous principle 
(which I have never clearly grasped) that sing- 
ing is an art. In the new aristocracy of the 
drawing-room a lady is actually asked whether 
she sings. In the old democracy of the dinner 
table a man was simply told to sing, and he had 
to do it. I like the atmosphere of those old 
banquets. I like to think of my ancestors, mid- 
dle-aged or venerable gentlemen, all sitting 
round a table and explaining that they would 
never forget old days or friends with a rumpty- 
iddity-iddity, or letting it be known that they 
would die for England's glory with their tooral 
ooral, etc. Even the vices of that society 
^87 



THE CHORUS 

(vhidi sometimes. I leAr. rendered the narrative 
portions of the son^ almost as cryptic and in- 
articulate as the chorus) were displayed with a 
more human softening than the same vices in the 
saloon bars of our own time, I greatly prefer 
Mr. Richard Sniveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. 
I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy wine in 
OTdo" that the wing of friendship might never 
moult a feather to the man who exceeds quite as 
much in whiskies and sodas, but declares all the 
time that he's for number one, and that you 
don't catch him paying for other men's drinks. 
The old men of pleasure (with their tooral 
ooral) got at least some social and communal 
Tirtoe out of pleasure. The new men of 
pleasure (without the slightest vestige of 
a tooral ooral) are simply hermits of irre- 
ligion instead of religion, anchorites of athe- 
ism, and they might as well be dmggiag 
theanselves with hashish or opium in a wilder- 



But the chorus of the old songs had another 
use besides this obvious one of asserting the 
288 



THE CHORUS 

popular element in the arts. The chorus of a 
song, even of a comic song, has the same pur- 
pose as the dioros in a Greek tragedy. It 
reconciles m^i to tbe gods. It cofaeets this 
one particular tale with the coanos and the 
phUosophv of common things. Tims we coo- 
stantly find in the old ballads, especiaHj the 
pathetic ballads, some refrain abont the grass 
growing green, or the birds singing, or tiie 
woods being merry in spring. These are win- 
dows opened in the house of tragedy; mo- 
mentary glimpses of larger and qpottr -. 
of more andoit and aidiiring landscap j 
of the country songs describing crrime :i. 
have refrains of a startling joviality £ 
cro"5v. just as if the whole compa: 
ing in with a shout of protest a^?,i:iiT i : : : _: : re 
a view of existQice. There Is a long _ — 
some ballad called '' The Ber: - 7 , " 
about a nmrder conmntted by ^ 
for the consimraiatiaii of whidi a 
is hanged, and Hat chorus (whicl 
in a kind of burst) runs : 



THE CHORUS 

*' And I'll be true to my love 
If my love'll be true to me." 

The very reasonable arrangement here sug- 
gested is introduced, I think, as a kind of throw 
back to the normal ; a reminder that even " The 
Berkshire Tragedy " does not fill the whole of 
Berkshire. The poor young lady is drowned, 
and the wicked miller (to whom we may have 
been affectionately attached) is hanged; but 
still a ruby kindles in the vine, and many a 
garden by the water blows. Not that Omar's 
type of hedonistic resignation is at all the same 
as the breezy impatience of the Berkshire re- 
frain ; but they are alike in so far as they gaze 
out beyond the particular com.plication to more 
open plains of peace. The chorus of the ballad 
looks past the drowning maiden and the miller's 
gibbet, and sees the lanes full of lovers. 

This use of the chorus to humanise and dilute 
a dark story is strongly opposed to the modem 
view of art. Modem art has to be what is called 
" intense." It is not easy to define being in- 
tense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying 
290 



THE CHORUS 

only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. 
Modern tragic writers have to write short 
stories; if they wrote long stories (as the man 
said of philosophy) cheerfulness would creep in. 
Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely 
painful. And doubtless they bore some re- 
semblance to some lives lived under our success- 
ful scientific civilisation ; lives which tend in any 
case to be painful, and in many cases to be 
brief. But when the artistic people passed be- 
yond the poignant anecdote and began to write 
long books full of poignancy, then the reading 
public began to rebel and to demand the recall 
of romance. The long books about the black 
poverty of cities became quite insupportable. 
The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the 
London tragedy has no chorus. Therefore peo- 
ple welcomed the return of adventurous novels 
about alien places and times, the trenchant and 
swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not 
narrowly on the side of the romantics. I think 
that glimpses of the gloom of our civilisation 
ought to be recorded. I think that the be- 
291 



THE CHORUS 

wilderments of the solitary and sceptical soul 
ought to be preserved, if it be only for the pity 
(yes, and the admiration) of the happier time. 
But I wish that there were some way in which 
the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end 
of each chapter of stiff agony or insane terror 
the choir of humanity could come in with a 
crash of music and tell both the reader and the 
author that this is not the whole of human ex- 
perience. Let them go on recording hard scenes 
or hideous questions, but let there be a jolly re- 
frain. 

Thus we might read : " As Honoria laid down 
the volume of Ibsen and went wearily to her 
window, she realised that life must be to her not 
only harsher, but colder than it was to the com- 
fortable and the weak. With her tooral ooral, 
etc. ; " or, again : " The young curate smiled 
grimly as he listened to his great-grandmother's 
last words. He knew only too well that since 
Phogg's discovery of the hereditary hairiness of 
goats religion stood on a very different basis 
from that which it had occupied in his child- 



THE CHORUS 

hood. With his rumpty-iddity, rumpty- 
iddity ; " and so on. Or we might read : " Uriel 
Maybloom stared gloomily down at his sandals, 
as he realised for the first time how senseless 
and anti-social are all ties between man and 
woman ; how each must go his or her way with- 
out any attempt to arrest the head-long separa- 
tion of their souls," And then would come in 
one deafening chorus of everlasting humanity 
" But I'll be true to my love, if my love'll be true 
to me." 

In the records of the first majestic and yet 
fantastic developments of the foundation of St. 
Francis of Assisi is an account of a certain 
Blessed Brother Giles. I have forgotten most 
of it, but I remember one fact : that certain stu- 
dents of theology came to ask him whether he 
believed in free will, and, if so, how he could 
reconcile it with necessity. On hearing the ques- 
tion St. Francis's follower reflected a little while 
and then seized a fiddle and began capering and 
dancing about the garden, playing a wild tune 
and generally expressing a violent and invig- 
^93 



THE CHORUS 

orating indifference. The tune is not recorded, 
but it is the eternal chorus of mankind, that 
modifies all the arts and mocks all the individu- 
alisms, like the laughter and thunder of some 
distant sea. 



294 



A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

In books as a whole marshes are described as 
desolate and colourless, great fields of clay or 
sedge, vast horizons of drab or grey. But this, 
like many other literary associations, is a piece 
of poetical injustice. Monotony has nothing to 
do with a place; monotony, either in its sensa- 
tion or its infliction, is simply the quality of a 
person. There are no dreary sights ; there are 
only dreary sightseers. It is a matter of taste, 
that is of personality, whether marshes are 
monotonous ; but it is a matter of fact and 
science that they are not monochrome. The 
tops of high mountains (I am told) are all 
white; the depths of primeval caverns (I am also 
told) are all dark. The sea will be grey or blue 
for weeks together; and the desert, I have been 
led to believe, is the colour of sand. The North 
Pole (if we found it) would be white with cracks 
of blue; and Endless Space (if we went there) 
would, I suppose, be black with white spots. If 
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A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

any of these were counted of a monotonous 
colour I could well understand it; but on the 
contrary, they are always spoken of as if they 
had the gorgeous and chaotic colours of a cos- 
mic kaleidoscope. Now exactly where you can 
find colours like those of a tulip garden or a 
stained-glass window, is in those sunken and 
sodden lands which are always called dreary. 
Of course the great tulip gardens did arise in 
Holland; which is simply one immense marsh. 
There is nothing in Europe so truly tropical as 
marshes. Also, now I come to think of it, there 
are few places so agreeably marshy as tropics. 
At any rate swamp and fenlands in England are 
always especially rich in gay grasses or gorgeous 
fungoids; and seem sometimes as glorious as a 
transformation scene ; but also as unsubstantial. 
In these splendid scenes it is always very easy to 
put your foot through the scenery. You may 
sink up to your armpits ; but you will sink up to 
your armpits in flowers. I do not deny that I 
myself am of a sort that sinks — except in the 
matter of spirits. I saw in the west counties 
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A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

recently a swampy field of great richness and 
promise. If I had stepped on it I have no 
doubt at all that I should have vanished; that 
ffions hence the complete fossil of a fat Fleet 
Street journalist would be found in that com- 
pressed clay. I only claim that it would be 
found in some attitude of energy, or even of 
joy. But the last point is the most important 
of all; for as I imagined myself sinking up to 
the neck in what looked like a solid green field, 
I suddenly remembered that this very thing 
must have happened to certain interesting 
pirates quite a thousand years ago. 

For, as it happened, the flat fenland in which I 
so nearly sunk was the fenland round the Island 
of Athelney, which is now an island in the fields 
and no longer in the waters. But on the abrupt 
hillock a stone still stands to say that this was 
that embattled islet in the Parrett where King 
Alfred held his last fort against the foreign 
invaders, in that war that nearly washed us as 
far from civilisation as the Solomon Islands. 
Here he defended the island called Athelney as 
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A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

he afterwards did his best to defend the island 
called England. For the hero always defends 
an island, a thing beleagured and surrounded, 
like the Troy of Hector, And the highest and 
largest humanitarian can only rise to defending 
the tiny island called the earth. 

One approaches the island of Athelney along 
a low long road like an interminable white string 
stretched across the flats, and lined with those 
dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dul- 
ness. At one point of the journey (I cannot 
conceive why) one is arrested by a toll gate at 
which one has to pay threepence. Perhaps it 
is a distorted tradition of those dark ages. 
Perhaps Alfred, with the superior science of 
comparative civilisation, had calculated the 
economics of Denmark down to a halfpenny. 
Perhaps a Dane sometimes came with twopence, 
sometimes even with twopence-halfpenny, after 
the sack of many cities even wdth twopence three 
farthings ; but never with threepence. Whether 
or no it was a permanent barrier to the bar- 
barians it was only a temporary barrier to me. 
S98 



A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

I discovered three large and complete coppers in 
various parts of mj person, and I passed on 
along that strangely monotonous and strangely 
fascinating path. It is not merely fanciful to 
feel that the place expresses itself appropriately 
as the place where the great Christian King hid 
himself from the heathen. Though a marshland 
is always open it is still curiously secret. Fens, 
like deserts, are large things very apt to be mis- 
laid. These flats feared to be overlooked in a 
double sense; the small trees crouched and the 
whole plain seemed lying on its face, as men do 
when shells burst. The little path ran fearlessly 
forward; but it seemed to run on all fours. 
Everything in that strange countryside seemed 
to be lying low, as if to avoid the incessant and 
rattling rain of the Danish arrows. There were 
indeed hills of no inconsiderable height quite 
within call ; but those pools and flats of the old 
Parrett seemed to separate themselves like a cen- 
tral and secret sea; and in the midst of them 
stood up the rock of Athelney as isolate as it 
was to Alfred. And all across this recumbent 
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A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

and almost crawling country there ran the glory 
of the low wet lands ; grass lustrous and living 
like the plumage of some universal bird; the 
flowers as gorgeous as bonfires and the weeds 
more beautiful than the flowers. One stooped 
to stroke the grass, as if the earth were all one 
kind beast that could feel. 

Why does no decent person write an historical 
novel about Alfred and his fort in Athelney, in 
the marshes of the Parrett.'' Not a very his- 
torical novel. Not about his Truth-telling 
(please) or his founding the British Empire, or 
the British Navy, or the Navy League, or 
whichever it was he founded. Not about the 
Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought (as an 
eminent historian says) to be called the Pact of 
Chippenham. But an aboriginal romance for 
boys about the bare, bald, beatific fact that a 
great hero held his fort in an island in a river. 
An island is fine enough, in all conscience or 
piratic unconscientiousness, but an island in a 
river sounds like the beginning of the greatest 
adventure story on earth. " Robinson Crusoe " 
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A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES 

is really a great tale, but think of Robinson 
Crusoe's feelings if he could have actually seen 
England and Spain from his inaccessible isle! 
" Treasure Island " is a spirt of genius : but 
what treasure could an island contain to com- 
pare with Alfred? And then consider the 
further elements of juvenile romance in an 
island that was more of an island than it 
looked. Athelney was masked with marshes; 
many a heavy harnessed Viking may have started 
bounding across a meadow only to find himself 
submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious 
splendour spreading round me ; I see glimpses of 
a great romance that will never be written. I 
see a sudden shaft quivering in one of the short 
trees. I see a red-haired man wading madly 
among the tall gold flowers of the marsh, leaping 
onward and lurching lower. I see another shaft 
stand quivering in his throat. I cannot see any 
more, because, as I have delicately suggested, I 
am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland 
does not sustain me, and I sink into its depths 
with a bubbling groan. 

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OT 



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